Won’t lie I’m getting sold on this via this discussion
I mean, security is an unintended outcome of it. Any kind of isolation of packages provides a level of security.
All of these points are completely correct and paint an accurate picture of the inherent issues with both technologies.
My intent with my earlier comment was to show how flatpaks and appimages were different from traditional package managers at a high level so I could ask what made nixpkgs different from something I felt and still kinda feel is a more accurate comparison which are traditional package managers like apt etc.
The big selling point to me now is that nixpkgs seem to work similarly to virtualenvs from Python which is cool.
So it sounds like nixpkgs is more akin to virtualenvs in Python rather than a traditional package manager. Is that an accurate statement?
If so, I’d recommend that be your selling point because that’s some powerful security.
You’re not exactly comparing apples to apples here.
Flatpak and appimages tend to be used in any distro because they can just be downloaded in a one off manner and installed then you’re running the application (for the most part). They offer a manager of sorts but you don’t need it to use the packages.
For nixpkgs, whike I’m sure I can get a package from the sounds of the sizes the package covers only the application or the library, meaning I still need the dependencies.
So what exactly would make me the user trade my built in tools (apt/pacman/dnf) for nix? Keep in mind no matter how great you feel it is, you need to provide reasoning that motivates me to install and learn this new tool instead of the old ones I have.
Does that mean Republicans are going to vote Biden since they shill Russia?
+1 to this. I built a few deb packages at a previous company. It was a solid packaging suite but good lord was it a pain to work through