Flathub is by far one of the most popular app stores you’ll find on Linux, with claims that it might be the best thing about Linux. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works on basically every distro you’ll find. You’ll find well over 2,800 apps on it, downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Those are great numbers for any app store, but they don’t necessarily make it better.
Because in the world of Linux, no single program or platform is outright better than its rivals. And when you’re comparing package managers, Nixpkgs can run circles around the field with its over 140,000 software packages.
Linux is more than a backup OS, and these programs prove it.
Nixpkgs is the largest repository of Nix packages and NixOS modules, hosted on GitHub and maintained by a global open-source community with backing from the NixOS Foundation. It’s less like an app store and more like a massive, community-curated recipe book. Each entry isn’t a pre-packaged binary in its own isolated sandbox—it’s a reproducible set of instructions for building a piece of software from source, describing every dependency, every build flag, and every patch required.
The NixOS 250.05 release alone added 7,840 new packages, updated 28,054 existing ones, and removed 1,694 outdated entries to keep the collection clean, updated, and safe. It’s the kind of maintenance pace most projects can only dream of. Nixpkgs is one of the largest and most updated package repositories you’ll ever find.
Nixpkgs is the open-source package collection for the Nix ecosystem, containing over 100,000 packages that can be installed reproducibly across Linux and other platforms.
The primary reason you’ve never heard of Nixpkgs, especially during package manager comparisons, is that it lives in an entirely different section of the Linux world: NixOS. NixOS is a Linux distribution built entirely around the Nix package manager and its declarative configuration model. If you’ve never used NixOS, you’ve probably never bumped into Nixpkgs either. Flathub, by comparison, works on just about every Linux distro you can download today with a single command.
There’s also the learning curve. NixOS forced me to declare my OS instead of building it, and that’s a fundamental difference in how we use computers. Nix also uses its own configuration settings to define packages and system states. Compared to clicking install on a Flathub page, writing a Nix expression is a lot more involved, not to mention only terminal-compatible.
This introduces a ton of onboarding friction for new users, where they have to change their entire understanding of how apps install and work on their systems. The payoff, however, is huge. In exchange for the initial complexity, you get fully reproducible environments, atomic upgrades, effortless rollbacks, and the ability to run multiple versions of the same software without dependency conflicts. Once the Nix way of doing things clicks for you, it’s hard to go back.
NixOS is a Linux distribution that uses a declarative configuration system to build and manage your entire OS reproducibly from a single source of truth.
If you like the idea of Nixpkgs but don’t want to switch over to NixOS to use it, you don’t have to. You can install the Nix package manager on any Linux distro, just like Flathub. One curl command gets Nix running on your system, and from there, you can install packages without them ever touching your system’s native package manager. Everything lives in /nix/store, completely isolated, so there’s zero conflict with apt or other package managers.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -L https://nixos.org/nix/install --daemon
The better way to do this, however, is using Home Manager, a tool that lets you manage your user environment declaratively using Nix on any Linux system. You declare what you want—packages, dotfiles, environment variables—and Home Manager builds it. You can also fire up a temporary shell with any package you need using nix shell nixpkgs#package-name, test it, and walk away without cluttering your system.
Nixpkgs’ size is impressive, but the real advantage is not the number of packages you get. Since every package is defined in the same common Nix language, any contributor can review and update any package, even ones they don’t personally maintain. That’s why the repository scales the way it does. There are thousands of contributors keeping the more than 140,000 packages current. No other Linux packaging ecosystem comes close.
Five free apps that actually replace paid ones.
And because Nix builds packages in complete isolation, computing a unique hash from every dependency, source file, and build instruction, installing or upgrading one package literally cannot break another. That’s a guarantee most package managers can’t make. You also get rollbacks baked in at every level, so if an upgrade breaks something, going back is a single command rather than a backup restoration.
Flathub is a fine app store, and it will keep doing what it does well. But if you want the actual breadth of Linux software in one place—maintained obsessively, updated constantly, and available on your current distro—Nixpkgs is the way to go. It might be tricky to use at first, but it puts the Linux software world at your fingertips, without any of the issues.
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