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Installing Every Arch Package

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Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#61

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

> Install every package of a different distro? In particular, I’d like to see someone do this for Ubuntu, Debian, and NixOS and watch them suffer. This was painful enough.

I'm not sure that would cause any suffering in NixOS other that running out of disk space; one of the big claims of nix is that it happily lets you install whatever you want without conflicts. Although they also have a somewhat different idea of what "install" means; you might have to still put in some work to surface as many programs as possible to a single shell's PATH.

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#63

Post by arianvanp »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #61

> Install every package of a different distro? In particular, I’d like to see someone do this for Ubuntu, Debian, and NixOS and watch them suffer. This was painful enough. I'm not sure that would cause any suffering in NixOS other that running out of disk space; one of the big claims of nix is that it happily lets you install whatever you want without conflicts. Although they also have a somewhat different idea of wh…

Replit actually has every nix package installed: https://blog.replit.com/nix

They mount a 1TB volume with all packages preinstalled

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#64

Post by xyproto »

seanw444 wrote: post #48
brightball wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a real problem?

It's only a matter of time. Linux really only has a good malware track record due to lack of popularity.

All official Arch Linux packages are curated, and the unofficial ones are ~40 lines of shell script, with a voting system on top.

These mechanisms for filtering packages are normally not present on systems that are plagued with malware.

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#65

Post by jonringer117 »

Copying my comment from reddit[0]:

For clarity, Arch has about 10k packages, AUR has around 60k packages. I believe this post is "just" about the 10k.

> I’d like to see someone do this for Ubuntu, Debian, and NixOS and watch them suffer.

Speaking for NixOS:

I have. I would sometimes do a nixpkgs-review[1] of the mass "rebuild" PRs for Nixpkgs[2]. Hard to know how long it took to build as I would just let it "cook" on my build server while I did other things. The other thing is that nix gives unique names to all built packages and utilizes "maximal sharing" thereof, so everything gets memo-ized[3] on future runs.

The scale of the official nixpkgs repository is 4-6x greater than that of Arch (AUR is the user repository). 9.6k Arch packages vs 59.4k Nixpkgs packages according to repology[4]

Lastly, installing packages in nix is different. Everything goes into the nix store, which is relatively "inert". I don't need to worry about "hooks" or stateful logic being executed affecting my system. "But then how do you create services and other meaningful abstractions needed to make an OS? I thought NixOS was a distribution" It is, and it's down through NixOS modules[5] in the form of a configuration.nix. The NixOS modules can compose the verticals in my system to deliver something coherent and amazing.

Server used:

    OS: NixOS 22.05 (Quokka) x86_64
    Kernel: 5.10.91
    CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (128) @ 2.900GHz
    Memory: 125913MiB / 257687MiB
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/shxq12/comment/hv5by... [1]: https://github.com/Mic92/nixpkgs-review [2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/144730#pullrequestrevi... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization [4]: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/newest [5]: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Module

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#66

Post by Datagenerator »

nix23 wrote: post #43
Datagenerator wrote: post #27

Fun stuff. Reminds me of one former coworker, which didn't like me introducing FreeBSD. So he started installing all ports packages.. only to say the following morning: Look it's broken! ( disk was obviously full and this plot was irrational to people with some common sense ).

"Nice" former coworker...hope you found your way to freebsd anyway :)

Sure did, still in active production use mostly for the excellent ZFS integration hosting many PB's of research data.

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#68

Post by qbasic_forever »

lilboiluvr69 wrote: post #67

Can anybody tell me which terminal is next to cool-retro-term (on the right) in this image? https://ta180m.exozy.me/images/bloated-kde.webp

Looks like just a different preset or setting for cool-retro-term to me. It doesn't have to be amber and super curved, the IBM/DOS preset is pretty tame IIRC. Or just go into the settings and turn off and tweak things as appropriate.

Regardless, if you want a nice terminal that isn't retro shaded and has zero UI cruft like tabs, menus, etc. check out Alacritty.

Re: Installing Every Arch Package

#69

Post by jandrese »

fran-penedo wrote: post #22

> Now is this useful? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no. I can think of exactly zero uses of this experiment (and I must be pretty crazy for doing it). Well, at the very least it's a very computationally expensive test that managed to catch a few packaging bugs.

In the bad old days we used to do the "kitchen sink" installs of Redhat because our machines weren't connected to the internet nor did they have access to the install media after install, so if we needed a package and it wasn't already installed it was a big problem.

Even today it's kind of a headache to install packages on machines with no Internet access, usually the easiest solution is to download everything and setting up a package repo on the LAN.

If you want real fun, try setting up a nontrivial node.js project without direct Internet access.

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