I feel like inmutable distros are in a quite good state nowadays, and while solutions like bootc and sysexts are not “mainstream” yet, it’s getting there

when it comes to getting non Flatpak packages, things get interesting, there are a lot of options, really

AppImages, statically linked binaries, tarballs, OCI containers, distrobox/toolbx, Homebrew, VMs, Nix even experimental formats like RunImages, AppBundles and FlatImages

if you need some non-system level package, you’ll have a way to use it yet, still it seems sort of chaotic “which one should I choose? how will I be able to easily manage them?”

GPM, dbin, Soar, AM… and the list goes on

and it’s okay, the so called cloud native approach is still evolving, so this fragmentation is expected so it’s nice to share opinions about this while we’re living this interesting phase any thoughts?

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    nix doesnt have any of these, but sandboxing is hard, there is either stable or unstable, changing and configuring things is very complex. Likely no official packages. Still the method I prefer.

    Nix is what I use, and it was frustrating to have to hack a lot of it into place, but I feel like it has the most potential. Unfortunately the flakes nonflakes split, in combination with the split of “distros” like determinate nix, flox, and so on, and the governance concerns really hold it back. It has horrific documentation, for the most part caused by the above (flakes are “experimental” and so can’t be included in official docs), and it is frustrating the lengths I have to go to to make stuff work that should be easy.

    For example, GPU acceleration of Nix packaged apps on non Nixos systems. I figured out how to do it:

    (config.lib.nixGL.wrappers.mesa pkgs.gzdoom)

    source

    But I think it’s just straight up impossible to do this via imperative package installs, outside of home manager. And it’s kind off important if you want any GUI app whatsoever to work.

    But now that I have it working, I use Nixpkgs exclusively and am able to avoid the AUR entirely. To me, the AUR is a last resort, only for something like say, system level printer drivers (thankfully I’ve never needed to install anything to get printers to work). By ensuring that I only use the AUR once in a blue moon, I can make sure that I actually review the PKGBUILD when using it.