Hail to yee all!

Always looking for alternate OSes (and not only Linuces), I spent some time reading on the site of NixOS.

There are very few chances that anyone here will be interested by NixOS itself —except maybe some concepts, though. It ships systemd and some other crapware. BUT...

They say that they have built their OS "on top of [their] package-manager". (Doesn't it remind a distro whose 4-letter name starts with a V, mmm?) Here is how they put it exactly:
NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.
The said Nix package-manager is described as follows:
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.
Nix is supposed to work on potentially any *nix: Linuces, BSDs, Solaris, even macOS! Hence the name?

Of course, what would be the use of a package-manager coming… without packages? But that's been taken care of:
Nixpkgs, the Nix Packages collection, contains thousands of packages, many pre-compiled.
The Nix Packages collection (Nixpkgs) is a set of over 40 000 packages for the Nix package manager, released under a permissive MIT/X11 license.
40,000? Not too bad! A bit further on the same page, it's said that
On GNU/Linux, the packages in Nixpkgs are ‘pure’, meaning that they have no dependencies on packages outside of the Nix store. This means that they should work on pretty much any GNU/Linux distribution.
What means "pretty much any GNU/Linux distribution", this I wonder. As systemd has become a de facto industrial standard (like it or not), do they mean "pretty much any GNU/Linux distribution [with systemd]"?

And indeed, there is a "nix" package in the AUR. It is flagged "out of date" since 21/11/2019. But as we all know, Arch is systemd… So let's see somewhere else!

Bingo! There are two packages for Nix in the Void repos, namely "nix" and "nix-32bit".

Now, out of curiosity, this question:

Knowing that Arch and NixOS are systemd… But also figuring a package-manager is possibly independant of this shit crap… Also knowing that the Nix package-collection contains packages for 32-bit… And knowing that Void (which has forced a elogind upgrade without warning its users, ask fungalnet, but so far is still without systemd) provides a package to run Nix on its own OS --and supposedly not to allow the user to break it…

... is it possible (in theory/in practice) to manage one's packages with Nix on Obarun?


And what the heck for, you loco?

Well, I won't answer this question. (And I'm not "loco", just curious, you blasé!)

But YOU can try to make your own opinion consulting this page.

And of course, you are welcome to post this opinion below. :)

Yours
... is it possible (in theory/in practice) to manage one's packages with Nix on Obarun?
why not as a far as you're able to use pacman on void on xbps on arch or portage.
If you can install the package manager you can use it.
AFAIAC pacman is the major reason to continue to use arch
Everything else I have tried seems mediocre at least in comparison.
A pkg manager to install and configure a package the pkg must be compatible, meaning it is packaged according to the specs of the manager. In pacman there is pkgbuild. Out of the box pacman can not install a .deb or an .rpm pkg, but aur has some tools to do this. If you run parallely 2-3 pkg managers how does one know what the other installs? Let's say you use pacman and xbps. pacman pkg1 has a dependency on glibc, pkg2.xbps also has a dependency on glibc-xxx.xbps. xbps doesn't know whether pacman has installed glibc and tries to install it (same or different version) on top, running into conflicts. So this becomes a major source of headache and incompatibility.
Note: Many packages in AUR are really deb with a customized PKGBUILD template so the aur helper downloads the deb from a debian repository, then fulfills the pacman information, then explodes the compressed archive and places them into place. So pacman knows this aur pkg, its dependencies and dependents. dpkg is a good example.

I think what you want is Bedrock linux.
Thanks for answering, Éric! :)

Well, from all the premises that I have mentioned in # 1, I had sort of deduced that it is possible in theory. (According to what you have answered, how modular is Linux! I'm each day a bit more astonished.) Now, the way you answered sounds like you haven't tried personally? Am I wrong?
Nevermind: although in order to be quite sure it's feasable in practice, one has to... "just do it" (tm), I'd rather wait until the AUR package for Nix is updated/renewed/whatever-the-right-word-is, at least not "out of date" anymore. I'm not advanced enough to risk messing my Obarun installation, which is my main system. --Once again, my question comes out of curiosity! But I'd rather not this curiosity "kill the cat".

Thank you all the same! :)

If anyone coming across this thread has indeed installed Nix (when its package wasn't "out of date") and indeed used it, thanks in advance to give some experience feedback.

Cheers!
@ fungalnet
He vanished, he is playing with Bedrock, I bet
Haha! No, I'm not! Been busy, but not playing with Bedrock. Although it's been some time I'm aware this "meta-distro" exists.
If you run parallely 2-3 pkg managers how does one know what the other installs? Let's say you use pacman and xbps. pacman pkg1 has a dependency on glibc, pkg2.xbps also has a dependency on glibc-xxx.xbps. xbps doesn't know whether pacman has installed glibc and tries to install it (same or different version) on top, running into conflicts. So this becomes a major source of headache and incompatibility.
Thanks for reminding me this no nonsense pragmatic principle.
Many packages in AUR are really deb with a customized PKGBUILD template so the aur helper downloads the deb from a debian repository, then fulfills the pacman information, then explodes the compressed archive and places them into place. So pacman knows this aur pkg, its dependencies and dependents.
I'm learning something. Thanks.

Now, once again, that's theory and speculation: Say that, 1. for some reason, you are convinced by Nix features and attracted by its "Package collection" (which, by the way, I've not found any way to inspect on the NixOS/Nix site) and that 2. you don't want to install NixOS (because e.g. you don't want systemd that comes with it). You may want to fresh-install a distro that comes without systemd, make some minimal post-install, THEN install Nix package-manager and then ONLY use this package-manager from now on, in sake of avoiding the problem of possible conflicts that your message points at. Does it make sense?

(And be assured I won't apply this procedure before... quite long!)
8 days later
It seems the Nix package-manager has been a source of inspiration and its concepts have been implemented by the guys of the libre (FSF endorsed) and independant GuixSD linux distro.

https://guix.gnu.org/

"Guix" (pronounce "Geeks" haha!) is both the name of the package-manager and of the distro built around it. But to avoid confusion, I'll call the distro GuixSD, although the guys at the distro themselves sort of stopped to do so.

As I said earlier, GuixSD is an independant distro. It's no Debian, Arch, whatever derivative. And it provides the linux-libre kernel.

As for the package-manager itself, there is a package of guix available in AUR, which is described as follows:
A purely functional package manager for the GNU system
I have not tried it. Just mentioning for those out there who are curious and more adventurous than I am! :)

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