Seeing this prompted me to do an experiment.

There was a time when Nixpkgs was smaller than the AUR. And, until recently, Nixpkgs was larger than the AUR but still smaller than the combination of the main Arch repos with the AUR.

As it turns out, the current total package count for Arch and the AUR is 85,819.

For nixpkgs unstable, that number is 88,768.

NixOS 23.05 Stable has 83,740.

And considering the mention of 9,147 new packages and 4,015 removed packages, that would mean that 23.11 would have a total of:

88,872 packages. This is more than the current figures for Nixpkgs unstable, but this is going off data from separate sources (NixOS devs and repology, with repology still being slightly outdated)

And, as such, I think it's fair to say the winner is (drumroll please)....

The USER for having such incredible distributions, giving him the vast breadth of choice for what distro matches their workflow best.

I'm new to NixOS. Do I have to do anything extra to update NixOS? Or do I just update my flake and run nixos-rebuild switch --flake like I normally do to update packages?

Okay, folks. NixOS needs your help. No bull. I'm talking documenters, designers, coders, package maintainers. Why? Because the NixOS community has a lot on it's plate right now.

Like I can understand why flakes haven't become standardised, why it's still marked as unstable, even though it's pretty much feature complete, and that's because nix is a complex environment builder and the current contributes are taxed to the max.

But what is nix?

Nix's job is to create reproducible environments where you can put any library, any service, any application. It does this through compile time flags and modifying ELF headers to isolate applications on a system to their own, exclusive UNIX path. These are linked together as clojures, or a dependency graphs, that can share libraries, applications and services intetchangably with each othet, or use another version or patched version without causing any dependency conflicts.

You can fire up pretty much whatever you want and it will be reproducible elsewhere. It's like if you took a package manager, build environments, as well as VMs and micro services and make them kiss.

You can spin up a nix environment on any supported system and expect it to run 1:1. This however breeds complexity and there's a lack of NixOS contributors.

If only you spin up a nix environment on a VM or use it to replace your current build systems (because nix can use several build systems in one single environment), and then contribute back with some changes to nixpkgs, then you are helping to bring about the most powerful deployment tool since kubernetes.

No joke. Check out how you can contribute, because at the end of the day learning nix is gaining a new superpower.

This bug still exists (using nix-channel without name causes errors, a basic feature IMO) so watch out.

Unfortunately nix still needs work on it's UX.

Can someone please point me to a repo with a nix configuration for a desktop setup with a minimum of KDE? Bonus points for it being more like Fedora.