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I don't know what kind of package manager you were using, but I've never seen an update take a good part of an hour before Nix. Pretty much all popular package managers. APT/dpkg, DNF/rpm, pacman, etc. I have just updated one machine to the latest unstable. It updated 333 packages, a substantial part of that system. It took 1 minute and 50 seconds, most of it downloading. So, not sure how it takes a good part of an hour for you. Seriously, are we going to shame people who can't afford to buy lots of storage?? I'm not shaming anyone. Just saying that 1 or 2 TB is pretty normal nowadays (outside Mac, because Apple makes you pay for it). At any rate, you can make the size pretty similar to any other distribution. It's not like glibc or GNOME takes up substantially more disk space on Nix. If you end up using 100 GiB of storage, you are either keeping a lot of system generations around or you somehow have different nixpkgs versions in your system's closure, ending up with duplicate versions of glibc, etc. If the former is the case, set up automatic garbage collection and the space use will be far less. E.g. on one machine I have only three NixOS unstable generations and the system is 18 GiB (which includes a bunch of machine learning models, etc.). It would probably be substantially less on NixOS stable, since there are less differences between generations (e.g. I have qemu, webkitgtk, etc. three times). |
Total size of installation is roughly comparable between NixOS and, say, Ubuntu.
My laptop's Nix closure of 1 generation is 33 GB. My desktop Ubuntu has 27 GB (20 GB /usr + 7 GB in /var, where snaps and flatpaks are stored).
Indeed the disk usage of Nix comes from multiple generations. Every time there is a new version of glibc, gcc, or anything that "the world" depends on, it's another 33 GB download. Storing the old generation is entirely optional. The maximum disk space needed is 2 generations.
Updating Ubuntu to a new LTS version almost always costs me multiple hours, caused by interleaved questions on how to merge changed config files in /etc (which unfortunately one cannot seem to batch), apt installation being rather slow, and during recent years, the update generally breaking in some way that requires a major investigation (e.g. the updater itself dies, or afterwards I have no graphics). On NixOS, these problems do not exist, and the time to update is usually < 30 minutes.