> This is why "power users" aren't an important user model. Arch, Gentoo, Nix, and others exist if you want to be a "power user". Otherwise, extremely naive assumptions about the amount of effort expended by distro/package maintainers hand-wave the complexity away with "duh, just put it in Jenkins."
Surely distros could be based on top of Nix with carefully curated sets of packages with less effort than it takes to package everything for Debian.
And the advantage of doing this over letting application authors maintain their own packages and deptrees with flatpaks/appimage/whatever is...?
They could be based on top of Nix. In practice, it's more likely they'd be based on top of rpm-ostree. But that doesn't do anything to close the gap between the wild west of copr/ppa/aur and "get your application accepted into mainline repos" for someone who wants to distribute their app.
Translating from Nix to another packaging ecosystem usually entails removing specificity. This is why going in the opposite direction is harder. So I suspect we can provide escape hatches from Nix into Debian/RPM/Arch/Gentoo so that one would only have to maintain one fully specific package, but get easy translators for the other ecosystems.
Surely distros could be based on top of Nix with carefully curated sets of packages with less effort than it takes to package everything for Debian.