Nix - The Best Package Manager

today we're going to take a look at the Nyx package manager which is the best package manager for Linux systems and even for Mac OS so it can be a replacement for Homebrew and I think you can use it on some BSD systems as well and this is really the main thing that makes the Nyx package manager so cool to me because I use different Linux distributions on different machines and these distributions sometimes they have different package managers Debian derivatives for example use apt art uses Pac-Man and so on so if I wanted a script or if you wanted a script to automate the deployment process of these different machines whether you're deploying it from a minimal Debian base or a minimal archbase you can just first install the Nyx package manager and then everything else is going to be the same on those systems because it gives you reproducible builds real reproducible packages if a package works on one machine it's going to work on another so this is obviously a huge win if you're a power user that's running different Linux machines for different purposes but it's also really useful for noobs who might be distro hopping you know they haven't realized that they can just change their desktop environment on any distro yet so maybe they're hopping but then they get tripped up by different package managers and the different syntax that they have well now you just have to learn NYX OS and then it doesn't matter what district you go to because this package manager will be available on all of them or this is also useful for the people that can't find the packages that they want to install in their distros repository this is actually a really common thing that makes a lot of people not want to use Linux but now they could just install NYX and then they can get access to the 80 000 packages or over 80 000 packages that are in their repo so you're going to have access to things like Libre wolf Envy top Exodus and steam these are a lot of packages that can sometimes be really difficult to install on your system or at least you can't install them from your regular repos and speaking of steam there's also a lot of different emulators that are available in the Nyx 22.11 Channel and of course newer versions are going to be available in the unstable channel so yeah this is also going to be great for the gamers because a lot of these emulators might be kind of difficult for you to have to set it up and configure it yourself so once you've got this down it's very easy to reproduce all of these packages to reinstall all of these packages onto a different system so why don't I get into installing nics and prove to you guys just how great it is so installation can be done by simply copying this one liner here and then we can go ahead and paste that over into our terminal now I guess it's worth mentioning that automatically running random scripts that you download from the internet is not a safe practice so if you're afraid of getting hacked what you really should do or if you don't trust any of these sources is download this script first like just download it with curl the install.sh and then inspect it with your favorite text editor make sure nothing crazy is going on in there make sure it's not going to install any malware and then you can go ahead and install it but I'm going to go ahead and run this anyway because I like to live dangerously and the small chance that this will wrap my system will make make things interesting so when we run this it's going to give us a brief overview about everything it's going to do check if next is installed already and it's going to create some users and groups so we'll hit Y on this and then it gives us a little bit more verbose explanation as far as all the different files it'll create go ahead and hit yime hit Y for it to use sudo and then it's ready to continue so we'll let it run and do its thing and it doesn't take very long for it to run either I've heard that it's a lot faster than bootstrap or then home brew on Mac OS and I think it's also faster than the Aur from the last time I remember setting that up and uh let's see yeah so it's all done and it tells us that it won't work in an active shell so we'll just go ahead and launch a new one there or you can refresh this shell here and another thing that I recommend doing after you install NYX is to edit its configuration file inside of dot config NYX and the file is nicks.com and you can just create it if the file doesn't exist for whatever reason but put this inside of it experimental features equals Nix command and flakes so this is going to let you run your next commands a little bit less verbosely without having to do double hyphen and just these long commands for everything and flakes is going to let you actually search for packages on your NYX OS term terminal so once you've got that we can now actually start using NYX OS so why don't we search for a package Nyx search Nix pkgs and then just the name of your package so I'll do librew wolf here I think I'm spelling it right there and yeah it's just going to go ahead and search for librew Wolf so you can see the different results here but like I said I prefer to just use the um just use this search I think it just looks nicer at least it's better as long as you have a good internet connection so yeah we can put Libre wolf into here and there you go it's the same idea so when we click on this we actually get instructions for how to install it so this is the instructions for Nick's shell but we actually want the Nyx EnV instructions and this would be how we would do it if we're on NYX OS and this is how we would do it on a non-nix OS since really I'm just interested in the package manager not actually disco hopping to Nyx OS so let's go ahead and run it and so it's installing librew wolf 109 you'll see how quickly it installs this I think it also tends to install packages faster than when you're installing them from the Aur all right so it's done and I should be able to just run Libre wolf like this and hey look at that we've got it you guys so yeah Libre wolf this awesome browser that's basically just like hardened Firefox but with um you know with a uh ad blocker already pre-installed so there you go right it's got probably some of the best defaults of any browser I've used but despite librew wolf being such an awesome browser it's almost never available in the software repos of popular Linux distributions even on Arch Linux where having to install it from the arch user repository okay you have to go to the Aur to get software like librew wolf and speaking of the Aur you know this is really the reason the arch user repository is the reason that a lot of people myself included are using Arch Linux like for meme Arch is just a pretty generic Linux distro it I don't even run a bleeding edge kernel in my system on my archbox because well I like to have stability and of course it's using system D so there's really not a whole lot of difference between my Arch Linux configuration and Debian or stable Debian but I've got access to the Aur so the ease of installing that Niche software where that's never found in the main repos like Libre wolf it just makes you know the Aur makes it worth it because I don't have to get into snaps or flat packs or any of those other things that might bloat up your system which a lot of other distros are typically offering for installing this kind of software but now that capability is available on every Linux distro as well as Mac OS and I believe FreeBSD as well can use the next package manager and the amount of software that's in here is actually very comparable to the Aur like we see it says that there's 80 000 packages that are available or there's more than 80 000 packages available NYX OS and if we go to the Aur and I think it's packages yeah it tells us right here that there are 87 432 packages in the Aur as of today uh so yeah all of those packages or at least all the important ones they're going to be available inside of Nyx OS like or inside of the Nyx package manager like these ones here I think these first five uh are all just related to Arch like yeah they're Aur helpers and they're like Pac-Man gooeys Pac-Man is the package manager for Arch Linux but if we take a look at prism launcher for example so this is a Minecraft launcher uh and right now this is sorted by popularity right so these are the most popular packages in the Aur and we've got a prism launcher in there uh let's see what else we've got um why don't we do Spotify okay so this is a very Normie package right normies love Spotify and they can get it through the next package manager uh let's do Brave too we all like Brave it might not be brave bin though it's probably just gonna be like yeah let's try just regular Brave yeah look at that brave is in there and is there a newer one on the unstable Channel now they've got the latest one on the stable Channel let's see let's do one more one more good one why don't we do Zoom okay so this is like the most popular um video conferencing software right now and sure enough Zoom us it's available on NYX now I know that these are all horrible spyware programs you would probably never want them on your system but there's a lot of people that are using these different programs and since it's traditionally been very difficult to install a lot of these uh different pieces of software on Linux NYX is going to help bridge that gap for those users that might have actually made a lot of people hesitant to switch from Mac or Windows to Linux because it was just too hard for them to set up their heck and Spotify their zoom and their Minecraft and if you did have to install Zoom or maybe Skype for some reason let's see if they have Skype on here you might need this to talk to your grandma yeah there you go right so Skype for Linux so you can talk to the family you can put that on your system if you absolutely have to and this is probably going to be the like as far as harm reduction goes without introducing a lot of non-free software to your system that's probably the best way to do it without having to get into snaps flat packs and add a whole lot of bloat and even if you did end up installing a package that causes some issues on your system fixing that with NYX is very easy because NYX makes snapshots before you install a package so if I were to do NYX EnV list Generations uh well right now I just have the one since I've only installed Libre wolf but if I've had multiple packages that I installed there would be different Generations here and then I could just roll back like here I'll go ahead and install another piece of software just D menu so that installed it pretty quickly and now you see I've got these different Generations so if I wanted to roll this back let's say I mean this would never happen but let's say d menu broke my system for some reason I could just do NYX EnV roll back and now it's going to put me back on version one and so if I run this command again you'll see that my current version changes from 2 to 1. so very very easy to fix your system if you ever break it and this is why I think NYX is the superior package manager so definitely try it out on your Linux system or on your Mac system today like and com attack the algorithm follow me on Odyssey and have a great day

Channel: Mental Outlaw

Views: 100,582

Keywords: Mental Outlaw, mental, outlaw, nix, nixos, nix package manager, nix package manager arch linux, best package manger linux, nix mac os, nix vs homebrew

Id: BwEIXIjLTNs

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Ta_PegandoFogo]

NixOS really looks like a very good distro. But, why should i switch my custom riced Arch to NixOS?

[u/[deleted]]

Good video, and I like the idea. But I don't think that it's great for new users. Setting it up, is not exactly easy. But the main problem is, that programs you install with nix, are not appearing in the start menu.