[alfalfasprout]

The problem, unfortunately, is that Nix often finds itself in a chicken and egg scenario where nixpkgs fails to provide a lot of important packages or has versions that are old(er). But for there to be more investment in adding more packages, etc. you need more people using the ecosystem.

[arianvanp]

Nixpkgs is the largest and most up to date package repository according to https://repology.org/

I'm honestly curious what packages you have a problem with

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Proprietary package vendors often provide a. deb that assumes Ubuntu. Maybe also a. rpm for RedHat if you're lucky.

[tombert]

That's definitely true, but maybe I've just been lucky, pretty much every proprietary program I've wanted to install in NixOS has been in Nixpkgs.

Skype, Steam, and Lightworks are all directly available in the repos and seem to work fine as far as I can tell. I'm sure there are proprietary packages that don't work or aren't in the repo, but I haven't really encountered them.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I've unfortunately encountered a few. TotalPhase's Data Center software for their USB protocol analyzers is my current annoyance, someday I'll figure out how to get it to work but thus far it's been easier to just dedicate a second laptop to it.

[tombert]

I am hoping that Flakes will work to fix this problem somewhat; at least in theory it can be a situation of "get it to work once then it'll work forever", and then trivially distributed later (even without a blessing from Nixpkgs).

[atlintots]

Luckily Nix is also an excellent build system, and does provide escape hatches here and there when you really need them (e.g nix-ld).

[NoThisIsMe]

What are you talking about? Nixpkgs is one of the largest and most up-to-date distro package repos out there.