this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.