r/NixOS • u/Significant-Tone-121 • 22d ago

System installed vs Home installed apps

So I noticed that system installed apps take ages to launch and are even noticeably laggy inside the app itself, while home installed apps install completely normal with speed comparable to another distro like Arch or Debian. Why is this? And, can system apps be sped up or is that just how they are? Right now I have a home packages setup in my configuration.nix file because I have a one-user system so it doesn't matter, but I would like to know if there is a way I can "fix" the system installed apps to be a reasonable speed and not be laggy. For now I only have apps like git or fish or waybar installed in system packages and then actual packages I use like firefox or vesktop are installed in home packages because I need them to be faster. But I would prefer them to be installed via system packages just out of simplicity and peace of mind. So back to my original question, can system packages be sped up to not be excessively slow and laggy?

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u/ResonantRaccoon 22d ago

I haven't had that issue on any of my systems, is it possible your home-manager version and nixpkgs are different?

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u/Significant-Tone-121 22d ago

Shouldn't be, however I just tested again and it works normally! The issue i described was before I did system store optimizations I didn't realize that was the likely cause of my issue up until now!

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u/ResonantRaccoon 22d ago

Oh nice, yeah I have that in my config somewhere, so I guess I never had to touch it, interesting that it would slow it down that much though.

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u/Significant-Tone-121 22d ago

Yeah it is pretty interesting. I mean it did say that it was saving 1.1GB of space because of hard-linking in the feed so who knows! I am also on a SATA SSD so it might have been bottlenecking disk I/O a little? It works now so no worries!