this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Seeing this prompted me to do an experiment.
There was a time when Nixpkgs was smaller than the AUR. And, until recently, Nixpkgs was larger than the AUR but still smaller than the combination of the main Arch repos with the AUR.
As it turns out, the current total package count for Arch and the AUR is 85,819.
For nixpkgs unstable, that number is 88,768.
NixOS 23.05 Stable has 83,740.
And considering the mention of 9,147 new packages and 4,015 removed packages, that would mean that 23.11 would have a total of:
88,872 packages. This is more than the current figures for Nixpkgs unstable, but this is going off data from separate sources (NixOS devs and repology, with repology still being slightly outdated)
And, as such, I think it's fair to say the winner is (drumroll please)....
The USER for having such incredible distributions, giving him the vast breadth of choice for what distro matches their workflow best.
Gender neutral him moment
Though the difference is AUR packages aren't officially supported or tested and are commonly out of date. They also need to be built on your system
To be fair, the level of support for packages in nixpkgs is inconsistent. My config has a number of backported packages overlaid on top of nixpkgs where upstream is not up to date enough for me.
Package count is interesting to look at, but it doesn't really give a good picture of software availability. Distributions will split or combine packages differently. For example, the AUR has both binaries and source versions available for many packages.
There may be more but that doesn't mean that every Arch package is available on Nix
There is also nur (nix user repositories) which i think is more like AUR.
In my 4 years of intensively using Nix/NixOS, I've never used the NUR. I wouldn't know what for tbh. as it's easier for everyone to have things in Nixpkgs instead.