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by tkz1312 892 days ago
nixpkgs is (and has been for many years now) by far the largest and most up to date package collection of any linux distribution (including the air).

ref: https://repology.org/
1 comments
rowanG077 892 days ago
This is misleading. Because nixpkgs repackages all of npm, pip, hackage etc. packages. Stuff that on other distros are managed by their respective tools seperate from the distro packaging. Still nixpkgs is pretty vast.
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mbrumlow 892 days ago
Not misleading. Othet distros do similar or even the same. For example many if not all python modules are separate packages.

Even so. Removing the packages you talk about Nix is still largest. So again not misleading.

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throwup238 892 days ago
It's definitely misleading because nixpkgs takes it to an extreme: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/doc/languages-f...

Most Haskell packages are not included in the AUR and haskellPackages alone makes up over 17,000 packages on nixpkgs compared to ~1,100 on AUR - subtract just that and Arch pulls ahead. Nixpkgs also has almost twice as many Python packages because python310Packages is separate from python311Packages.

I bet there are lots of other non-language examples too: a quick search found emacsPackages which contains six thousand packages.

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mbrumlow 890 days ago
Showing that there are smaller scoped packages does not prove your point.

You have to prove that it has less of the software available on other distros. Even if you could find a billion small packages that represents only a single package in every distro this is not evidence or a proof that support your claim.

Simply put, you need to show where nix does not have a larger number of packages that are available on other distros.

Given that nix is mostly automated and pulls from the same root sources as every other distro you are going to be hard pressed to find a significant number of cases where nix lacks a package.

Not misleading.

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rowanG077 890 days ago
The original poster claimed nixpkgs has the largest and most uptodate package collection just because of the sheer number of nix packages. That's a wrong conclusion and thus misleading. If you want to claim that you need to do exactly what you are asking. You need to make a direct comparison what software is available and what is not. From my experience nixpkgs is better then ubuntu but worse then Arch.
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tkz1312 887 days ago
The metric you are looking for is the non-unique one on repology which counts only packages that are available on multiple distros. This is in fact the category where nixpkgs has the largest lead.

I think nixpkgs is probably so much larger for two reasons:

- running unpackaged software on nixos is painful. - it’s very easy to contribute to nixpkgs (standard github pr to a monorepo).

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