| The closest we have to a source of truth for that is the table on repology: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics By that table, debian 12 has 32k packages, and nixpkgs stable has 67k That said, repology doesn't track everything nixpkgs has nor everything debian has. It's also difficult to compare debian and nixpkgs. Debian has several packages for one thing where nixpkgs has only one, i.e. debian has "sqlite3, sqlite3-doc, libsqlite3-dev", while nixpkgs has the single "sqlite" package with the attributes "sqlite.bin, sqlite.dev" (and no docs split out I guess? They're probably in .out) Because debian splits out dev packages from binary packages, that artificially inflates the number. Another choice which makes the number very hard to compare is packaging style choices for certain dependencies. For example, in debian, a go package's dependencies must all be packaged as their own packages (https://go-team.pages.debian.net/packaging.html#_dependencie...). This leads to stuff like "golang-github-hashicorp-terraform-svchost-dev", a package that is only used as a library to build terraform. I'd argue it's not a user-facing package, just an implementation detail of the terraform package, but the count you mention above certainly includes it. nixpkgs, on the other hand, is fine with not splitting out each dependency as a full package on its own right, so go and rust libraries are much more sparse in nixpkgs. All of this is a lot of words to say "comparing numbers is hard, repology is the best we have right now" |