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I like NixOS, but I think the redundancy in the /nix/store could possibly take up a lot of space on a system with as little storage as the 64GB Steam Decks. Plu

• KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  NixOS hardlinks the /nix/store so there isn't much redundancy unless you are actually using packages that need completely different dependency versions. My system is currently at 13G but that could be optimised a bit & seems comparable to how much Archlinux used with the same packages installed. Archlinux isn't much better when it comes to storage efficiency. Arch does not seperate out documentation and development libraries from the main package so there is quite a bit extra stuff in a lot of packages. Valve can do a lot of things to save space like disable or delete the Pacman cache after every install. They could build their own repos/packages that stripped out documentation and development libraries. Overall compared to the size of many games, the storage overhead of Arch or Nix is pretty minimal. At Valve's scale either can & probably will be tweaked to take up <10GB. I guess I forgot that the base model's storage is only 64GB. It makes me wonder if they are going to have optimised game downloads with lower resolution textures; many games would use ~10% of the space if the texture's were optimised.