I was WRONG! This is the BEST Package Manager.

This standalone package manager is absolutely stunning and I can’t believe I’m just now discovering it’s true power. .

[ChrisTitusTech]

Thanks Internet for its "nicks" not " N-I-X".
I've since been using NIX in tandem with apt on a debian system and it is fantastic. No extra repositories and rock solid performance.

[nilnailscrew]

its nice to see nix and nixos gain more attention from the linux community in recent times, hopefully with more exposure the nix repos will get bigger and more well maintained, and documentation will improve.
Nixos really is a gamechanger and has fixed many of the problems the community is dealing with right now (immutability and cross distro packaging)

[brunoshure]

"nix-env operations such as upgrades (-u) and uninstall (-e) never actually delete packages from the system. All they do (as shown above) is to create a new user environment that no longer contains symlinks to the “deleted” packages.

Of course, since disk space is not infinite, unused packages should be removed at some point. You can do this by running the Nix garbage collector. It will remove from the Nix store any package not used (directly or indirectly) by any generation of any profile.

Note however that as long as old generations reference a package, it will not be deleted. After all, we wouldn’t be able to do a rollback otherwise."

This is what's written on the "Garbage Collection" section of the manual. Am I missing something? I don't think what's showed in this video is the proper way to manage applications via Nix.

[vpxc]

Within the Nix community, a lot of attention goes toward 'advanced' uses of Nix, like storing and deploying the configuration of a fleet of NixOS machines in a 'GitOps'-y workflow, or writing your own custom packages for your own applications.

It's really nice to see content that focuses on what cool stuff Nix can do for people even before they go all the way down the rabbithole!

[nevoyu]

Nix makes the AUR look tiny. It's fantastic! Also it's not N.I.X. It's literally called nix "nicks"

[FengLengshun]

I have joined the Nix train as well, with home-manager, and it IS great. It's not perfect, and it is far more complicated than it needs to be for casual use, but IMHO this is truly the perfect companion to flatpak, especially for CLI stuff. It makes more sense to use Nix over snaps in my opinion, and between Nix, flatpak, and distrobox, the amount of time I need to touch my host package manager can now be counted by hand. They legitimately made immutable a viable path for me.

[The-Other-Mario]

I always heard it pronounced "nicks" so I did a little digging and in the original paper it's stated that the name Nix is derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing, it's not an abbreviation.

[BREAKDRS]

I have been using NixOS for 3 years now and will never look back. It now powers all my servers, laptops, raspberry pis at home and in my company.

[MrDarkoiV]

I installed Nix for my Steam Deck, as pacman was both pain(I used mainly Debian based distros before) and new StemOS updates would wipe everything anyway,
and now my newest laptop will run NixOS. Nix is such a good package manager.

[con-f-use]

Nix is not a package manager, it's a build system and a great one at that. It can also handle a build artifact cache and remote building. It is NOT a package manager, because it doesn't do things that apt or homebrew or yum or what have you do. For example, it does not put systemd service files in any location. It does not copy config files. It does not do any setup in any way. It's important for new users to know, that they have to do that kind of setup themselves.

[drishalballaney]

actuallt it is better to use home manager and flakes for an even more reproducable setup, and if you want to go all out you can take a look at nixos

[fossware]

I've used NixOS for a while and loved the idea of basically having ur system blueprint in 1 file but nix itself is also great

[hahalolha]

I would love a full walkthrough of configuring/using Nix in video form. Nix looks pretty awesome!

[edbeckerich]

So will Nix package manager mean that you dont need Snaps, Flatpacks or Appimages anymore? That would be fantastic!

[neipas]

Linux users are like heroine addicts. Always chasing that dragon and never able to catch it.

[dalefribble]

Hi Chris,
This was an interesting video! Can you say a bit more about your terminal (prompt, config etc) that we see in this video? The mod looks nice.
Also can you say a bit more about the pros and cons of using two package managers in a linux system?

[peterjansen]

Finally on Nix. Good! I still am on Arch but I do think that Nix is awwwesome and I woulnd't mind using it.

[Oilzilla]

This is the Holy Grail of package management. Thank you!

[toromac]

Ha, how interesting that you mentioned doing a do over of an awesomewm set up on Debian. Just been trying to do that on Debian testing myself.

Got so far, but couldn't work out how to launch apps with a particular screen 😕

[matthiasbenaets]

True enlightenment. Next step is NixOS