this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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You're not exactly comparing apples to apples here.
Flatpak and appimages tend to be used in any distro because they can just be downloaded in a one off manner and installed then you're running the application (for the most part). They offer a manager of sorts but you don't need it to use the packages.
For nixpkgs, whike I'm sure I can get a package from the sounds of the sizes the package covers only the application or the library, meaning I still need the dependencies.
So what exactly would make me the user trade my built in tools (apt/pacman/dnf) for nix? Keep in mind no matter how great you feel it is, you need to provide reasoning that motivates me to install and learn this new tool instead of the old ones I have.
Flatpak still depends on runtimes though, I have a few different runtimes I had to install just because of one or two flatpaks that required them (like for example I have both the gnome and kde flatpak runtimes, despite not running either of those desktop environments)... and they can depend on specific versions of runtimes too! I remember one time flatpak recommended me to uninstall one flatpak program I had because it depended on a deprecated runtime that was no longer supported.
Also, some flatpaks can depend on another flatpak, like how for Godot they are preparing a "parent" flatpak (I don't remember the terminology) that godot games can depend on in order to reduce redundancies when having multiple godot games installed.
Because of those things, you are still likely to require a flatpak remote configured and an internet connection when you install a flatpak. It's not really a fully self contained thing.
Appimages are more self contained.. but even those might make assumptions on what libraries the system might have, which makes them not as universal as they might seem. That or the file needs to be really big, unnecessarily so. Usually, a combination or compromise between both problems, at the discretion of the dev doing the packaging.
The advantage with Nix is that it's more efficient with the users space (because it makes sure you don't get the exact same version of a library installed twice), while making it impossible to have a dependency conflict regardless of how old or new is what you wanna install (which is something the package manager from your typical distro can't do).
All of these points are completely correct and paint an accurate picture of the inherent issues with both technologies.
My intent with my earlier comment was to show how flatpaks and appimages were different from traditional package managers at a high level so I could ask what made nixpkgs different from something I felt and still kinda feel is a more accurate comparison which are traditional package managers like apt etc.
The big selling point to me now is that nixpkgs seem to work similarly to virtualenvs from Python which is cool.