Distro agnostic packages like flatpaks and appimages have become extremely popular over the past few years, yet they seem to get a lot of dirt thrown on them because they are super bloated (since they bring all their dependencies with them).

NixPkgs are also distro agnostic, but they are about as light as regular system packages (.deb/.rpm/.PKG) all the while having an impressive 80 000 packages in their repos.

I don’t get why more people aren’t using them, sure they do need some tweaking but so do flatpaks, my main theory is that there are no graphical installer for them and the CLI installer is lacking (no progress bar, no ETA, strange syntax) I’m also scared that there is a downside to them I dont know about.

      • AgileLizard@lemmy.ml
        5·
        10 months ago

        The garbage collector removes all packages/derivations that are not (transitively) used any more. So it is similar to apt-get autoremove. I don’t think that classifies as bloat. You could just regularly run the garbage collector.

    • root@precious.net
      11·
      10 months ago

      Having every application load their own version of a library into memory is bloat.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        They don’t, they share the same library version if they were built against it.

        Lots of software won’t even work if the library version is different, so it’s a benefit, not a downside