[X6S1x6Okd1st]

Yes they need to be ported, in the optimal case it's just specifing the build dependencies and the build command.

It's deprecation addressed so you only store any given dependency & version once, but if you need multiple versions you store each.

It's easy for the storage size to balloon, but also easy to garage collect away stuff you aren't using without worrying about it

You update the library and every thing it depends on

You need to restart the gui application after the upgrade

The download size can be big, I haven't found it much more inconvenient than other distros

Start up time is unremarkable

[lilyball]

Nix also defaults new build commands to the equivalent of `./configure && make && make install` so it works out of the box with a lot of packages, as long as you declare the build inputs that it may need.

As for disk size, beyond garbage collection, you can also ask Nix to sweep its store and hardlink identical files together in order to save space if you suspect significant file duplication (and if your FS doesn't already deduplicate blocks).