I read it is better than flatpak/appimage/snap.
"Adapting Snap on deepin: Since Snap has many compatibility issues except for Ubuntu, we gave up.
- Converting some of our homegrown apps to AppImage: AppImage has good portability, and these apps can easily be used on other distributions. However, it doesn’t have centralized repository storage and package management, and doesn’t provide the same level of sandboxing as Snap and Flatpak, so its security can’t be guaranteed, and it’s not suitable to be used as the default package management method for the operating system.
- In 2017, deepin followed up the Flatpak format and completed the construction of 100+ packages, but did not continue to adapt due to the large size of the application, excessive disk
occupation, slow bug fixing and other reasons. "
Did someone consider it as better alternative for these package formats or is this just “15 standard” for package formats because deepin wanted to make something.
Are there any distros which use it apart from deepin and which is packaged in this format, because I want to drop flatpak because it takes too much space on my system.
I use nix to get many cli apps (on arch/cachyos), but the flakes and non flakes split makes things very tough, and causes this annoying documentation split. And then certain things can only be done via flakes and vice versa.
I try to limit my use of nix to using home manager to ONLY install packages, but even then there are annoying things.
Like for example, many users may gravitate towards nix-env for installing packages, not understanding that oops, you aren’t actually supposed to use nix-env. nix profile install is better and more supported, but it’s flakes only. Flakes are off by default, and must explicitly be enabled because they are still “experimental” despite them being extremely popular. The official documentation is often hesitant to touch flakes because of this, so there is this horrific documentation split where a bunch of different unofficial docs cover flakes in varying manners.
Or, another thing is that nix apps on non nix distros have no gpu access/hardware acceleration. I have a home manager config to enable that: https://github.com/moonpiedumplings/home-manager/blob/main/home.nix#L32
And then I couldn’t figure out how to make that work on aarch64 (asahi) so I just had to disable it,
But it is something that is insane to make someone learn how to do for just installing programs. But the latter issue doesn’t affect nixos.
Anyway, I like nix. I use home manager, but for packages only, and I use it for my development environments.
Thank you very much for the elaborate answer!
If I’d have to distill your points, they mostly seem related to documention. Which is unfortunate. Would you say that’s a fair take?
Yes. Nix is fine as long as you do “supported” things. But the moment you step outside of that, it’s a nightmare and you have to be or consult an expert.
The lack of gpu acceleration is a dealbraker for making nix a flatpak alternative. And you can get it working but then it breaks the desktop integration unless you do more work and yeah.