Today, I wanted to have another go with nix. Previously I just read about it and didn’t do anything for a couple of months. Now, I installed nix package manager with very few lines of code and two more to install many packages as described in his post. Installation was very fast on my banana laptop. Until now I used distrobox but I always wondered which distro/ package manager to use. What’s your experience with it?
For now, I’ll test it. It’s super easy to use. It may not be straight forward to a linux newcomer but if you know what you want, e.g. ffmpeg you can just add it with home-manager edit and install it with home-manager switch. So far, I love it!
Bazzite user here and I’m using flatpaks whenever possible and distrobox for everything else; which are the benefits of Nix over these?
Nix has more packages , by far. Nix also automatically handles the dependent libraries for each package, which is something you can’t do with brew on immutable systems. This means that Nix can install software like espanso, which wouldn’t work on uBlue derivatives otherwise.
I really wish the uBlue maintainers would have opted for Nix over brew for that reason. It’s not much more difficult to do
nix profile install nixpkgs#package-nameoverbrew install package-name. They could have even aliased it to make it easier.There’s a GUI for it too
https://github.com/snowfallorg/nix-software-center
I just click install and it installs to the profile
It’s faster than distrobox, it’s not within a box but on host, it’s easier than most package managers. I still go for flatpak first but for everything else I use nix. Especially for programming environment it looks to be much better than distrobox
Using containers on Linux has basically no performance loss compared to running on the host. They share a kernel and nothing needs to be virtualized (unlike containers on macOS and Windows), so anything you run in a container is basically the same performance as running it on the host.
I still agree though: using Nix is better than using Distrobox for many other reasons.
Sorry, faster because installing a package is faster than with other managers since you don’5 have to deal with any copr, debs or anything and it’s really fast on my install. I haven’t compared it directly but it feels very fast.
Homebrew for CLI. Distrobox needs to be used with Arch, at least the Fedora boxes are literally not possible to system upgrade.
Nix is useful for CLI packages, which aren’t very simple to use through flatpak. It also has far more packages, and is very useful for creating development environments.