Yes. Nix is fine as long as you do "supported" things. But the moment you step outside of that, it's a nightmare and you have to be or consult an expert.

The lack of gpu acceleration is a dealbraker for making nix a flatpak alternative. And you can get it working but then it breaks the desktop integration unless you do more work and yeah.

Were these numbers generated using compsize or a similar tool that asseses deduplication, symlinks, and compression properly?

I get much different numbers than I use one or the other.

gdu:

gdu ~ Use arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help

***
/var/lib/flatpak
***
    2.6 GiB ████████  ▏/runtime
  471.7 MiB █▍        ▏/app
  114.4 MiB ▎         ▏/repo
    9.1 MiB           ▏/appstream
  164.0 KiB           ▏/exports
        0 B           ▏.changed

compsize:

[moonpie@nefertem flatpak]$ sudo compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak
Processed 73225 files, 31115 regular extents (70649 refs), 35977 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL       64%      1.9G         2.9G         6.4G
none       100%      1.3G         1.3G         2.6G
zstd        35%      596M         1.6G         3.8G

Only 2 gb's are actually being used, even though some tools might be reporting 6.4 gb.

And this is with these runtimes installed:

Name                                               Application ID                                     Version                               Branch                  Installation
Freedesktop Platform                               org.freedesktop.Platform                           freedesktop-sdk-23.08.34              23.08                   system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08-extra             system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08-extra             system
Codecs Extra Extension                             org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra                                                    25.08-extra             system
GNOME Application Platform version 49              org.gnome.Platform                                                                       49                      system
Breeze GTK theme                                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze                           6.6.5                                 3.22                    system

So you can get app which weights 4mb with runtime which weight 250 more than app itself.

Except for the fact that the runtime is reused across apps, meaning that another app which uses up that runtime won't be taking up any extra space.

Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing.

You can sandbox them with something like firejail or bubblewrap.

I hadn’t tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.

Similar, you can sandbox with bubblewrap. But you gotta write nix code to do it because ofc:

https://github.com/fgaz/nix-bubblewrap , https://github.com/nixpak/nixpak , https://sr.ht/~alexdavid/jail.nix/

I've tried to use them before though, definitely not as easy as flatpak's flatseal sandboxing in comparison. Also, nix apps on non nix distros aren't GPU accelerated.

How many devices and of how many types do you manage with how many people?

Automatically patch is another solution.

Of course it's difficult on the tech side. You can do something like failover/high availability, and then auto update one and it fails over if something breaks.

99% of cybersecurity news is what I call "cyberslop" and probably actively harmful to consume.

The vast majority of it is either so trivial that somebody else handled it, and you don't need to do anything. Like they often overhype a malware that doesn't do any novel techniques to get onto your systems and has already been added to the antivirus database anyways.

Or it's so grand in scale that you can't do anything, like nation states doing nation state things. Interesting yes, but it's ultimately a waste of my time to consume because it's not actionable.

Only a tiny fraction of news is actually actionable. It's usually stuff like cve's or zero days and the like. I just only really pay attention to those and ignore everything else.

Better, is probably to subscribe to an actual vulnerability feed so you don't have to go through the news cycle.

I use nix to get many cli apps (on arch/cachyos), but the flakes and non flakes split makes things very tough, and causes this annoying documentation split. And then certain things can only be done via flakes and vice versa.

I try to limit my use of nix to using home manager to ONLY install packages, but even then there are annoying things.

Like for example, many users may gravitate towards nix-env for installing packages, not understanding that oops, you aren't actually supposed to use nix-env. nix profile install is better and more supported, but it's flakes only. Flakes are off by default, and must explicitly be enabled because they are still "experimental" despite them being extremely popular. The official documentation is often hesitant to touch flakes because of this, so there is this horrific documentation split where a bunch of different unofficial docs cover flakes in varying manners.

Or, another thing is that nix apps on non nix distros have no gpu access/hardware acceleration. I have a home manager config to enable that: https://github.com/moonpiedumplings/home-manager/blob/main/home.nix#L32

And then I couldn't figure out how to make that work on aarch64 (asahi) so I just had to disable it,

But it is something that is insane to make someone learn how to do for just installing programs. But the latter issue doesn't affect nixos.

Anyway, I like nix. I use home manager, but for packages only, and I use it for my development environments.

Maybe. But they, and many others overestimate the amount of size flatpaks take up.

Flatpaks use a "runtime", a shared set of libraries and programs flatpak apps use. With one flatpak app, there is just one runtime. But with 2, 3, 10 flatpak apps, there are still only going to be 1 (to 3) runtimes on the system. This is not the same for something like appimage.

In the blog, they compare the size of deepin calculator across formats. But this is not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would involve comparing the app size without the runtime, or comparing many apps installed.

In addition to this, if you are on btrfs, further deduplication and compression is done. This (and symlinks) won't show up in many disk and space usage analysis tools. To get a more accurate measure, use compsize instead of traditional tools. It will show you how much transparent compression (when btrfs compresses files but you can stilll access them normally), symlimks and the like are saving space.

Anyway, I am interested in more cross distro package managers though. Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps.

Edit: linglong appears to reuse system libraries, which would probably lead to significanr space savings at the cost of portability across distros

I hope we get something that's not distro specific. Docker/podman work for a lot of stuff, but some apps/services aren't available via them, and I really would like an alternative to snaps, which often can ship those apps.

Also, these and the fedora one mentioned in the other comment appear to target immutable distros. Snaps work on any distro.

Cuz there are more than just browser caches I would like to nuke.

Cuz bleachbit is more granular, seperating out site data and cookies, enabling me to delete the 1gb alpine docker image downloaded by https://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/anuraOS without logging me out of anything that is using cookies. Firefox doesn't appear to have that option.

Edit: cuz I use multiple browser profiles, and this can delete cache from all of them at once instead of me having to do it once per profile 2-3 times.

Show is better than tell:

Often, when viewing images, firefox "caches" the image in order to be able to load it faster when visiting that site again. Left unchecked, this cache (of images and other assets) can pretty much infinitely grow. Many other apps also have big caches.

Bleachbit actually is useful. Instead of hunting through your system and accidentally rm -rfing the wrong folder and losing all your precious firefox profile data, it enables you to quickly nuke all caches, freeing up a significant amount of space. I would probably free up 15gb+ if I ran it based on these images.

EDIT: just ran it. I freed up 6gb of space. Not 15gb. Huh. Still, pretty good though, and if you are space starved (I used to use a machine with only 32 gb of storage TOTAL), then it's useful to keep things slim.

In my testing, zram has much, much better compression than zswap.

The points about LRU inversion, cgroups, and so on are valid, but at the end of the day, I don’t really care. I was able to open as many firefox tabs as I wanted with zram, but I could not do so with zswap, and that’s what matters to me.

The author of a blogpost is a facebook engineer. Millions of ultra high performance Linux servers are a very different usecase than a single desktop. It’s perfectly reasonable for a solution for one to not be appropriate for the other.

Copied from my previous comment about this where ISO also gave a similar reply and was met with a similar response lmao.

where does diagonal fall?