Welcome to my Linux distro showdown! I'll rank Linux distributions based on my personal experience and factors like stability, package manager, community support, privacy/security, & customizat...
That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won’t mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.
the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros.
Care to elaborate? I don’t remember packages not working, but if anything, they’re not building; which is basically the reverse of what happens at other distributions where sometimes, breakage during building isn’t noticed because the packages aren’t getting rebuilt when a dependency or the compiler toolchain changes.
I agree that Nix handles broken packages much better than Arch, but that’s more on the package managers themselves than the quality of packages.
NixOS Unstable has fairly frequent package breakages, especially for Python applications or packages using autogenerated dependencies. There are also many unmaintained packages. These unmaintained packages often get updated automatically without being tested, breaking them. Without a maintainer, some of these take a bit to be fixed.
I do think Nixpkgs packages are on average higher quality than AUR packages, they are just not up to the standards of many other repos official packages. Also, to be clear, I’m not hating on Nix or anything, I love Nix and NixOS is and has been my distro of choice for years.
While the full number might be inflated, it still has one of the most complete official repositories.
That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won’t mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.
Care to elaborate? I don’t remember packages not working, but if anything, they’re not building; which is basically the reverse of what happens at other distributions where sometimes, breakage during building isn’t noticed because the packages aren’t getting rebuilt when a dependency or the compiler toolchain changes.
I agree that Nix handles broken packages much better than Arch, but that’s more on the package managers themselves than the quality of packages.
NixOS Unstable has fairly frequent package breakages, especially for Python applications or packages using autogenerated dependencies. There are also many unmaintained packages. These unmaintained packages often get updated automatically without being tested, breaking them. Without a maintainer, some of these take a bit to be fixed.
I do think Nixpkgs packages are on average higher quality than AUR packages, they are just not up to the standards of many other repos official packages. Also, to be clear, I’m not hating on Nix or anything, I love Nix and NixOS is and has been my distro of choice for years.