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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

That's just not true. Nixpkgs has the largest package database of any distribution. It contains many closed source application that work flawlessly. Hell I can even run Vivado or Quartus on it which are two of the worst of the worst proprietary pieces of software on it. I also have packaged proprietary libraries for hardware we use at my company with no issues.

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It is answered at the end of my blog post:

> I don’t care about anything that’s not packaged by the distribution

> This is totally fine. Just note that you are using a niche OS with a limited set of applications available.

Yes, Nixpkgs is large, but it does not package every piece of software out there, and you either at mercy of distribution maintainers to keep it packaged, or do it yourself. There is no way to disintermediate you and application developers.

The point is that with NixOS you are in a much better boat then all other distributions. Because the chances that an application is working on NixOS compared to $insert_distribution_here is much higher. I do agree that windows/OSX are superior here.

Than all other _niche_ distributions. But that's not a very high baseline. I'd say it's abysmally low baseline.

When I was using NixOS I regularely saw software that was tested on Ubuntu and Fedora and had installation instructions for these two distros, but was missing from Nixpkgs (because it was experimental, new or very obscure), and didn't work out of the box with NixOS' FHS.

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