I have only encountered NUR recently, and I’m wondering what it’s place / purpose is as Flakes becomes a predominant paradigm of Nix{,OS,pkgs}. It seems to me (from very little information) that the purpose of NUR has largely been a way to let people access each others’ nix expressions easily, which flakes does too.
The only thought I had about the continuing utility of NUR is as a central place where all of these expressions are collected. How useful is this actually? Do people browse NUR? I feel like I would have to be directed to a NUR expression (which I’ve never been yet) in order to see it, which at that point why not just point to a personal github repo flake?
I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, I’m just trying to understand the state of the Nix ecosystem and how everything fits together / how people use things. For example, are there things I’ve made that I ought to be putting in NUR?
Being an almost daily and by now fairly proficient user of nix, nixpkgs and NixOS for two years now, I have exactly the same thought. I never ever used anything from NUR, or stumbled accidentally over it, and always found and referenced the custom packages or collections I needed directly. I don’t even think that flakes change anything about it, except maybe improve performance. But w.r.t. flakes I’ll be a late-majority adopter, so I never cared anyway.