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> I thought this would bring some space savings, because files that are not binary code should be largely the same.

Those ternary blobs tend to be cross-platform, I hear.

The nix store can do hard linking for the hashsum files. The nix store is read-only so you don't get modifications in general - does not really matter for boot disks, but in general.

You have to do extra work to get the hardlink deduplication in the store though:

https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.20/command-ref/nix-store/optimi...

Unlike in FHS distros where you get some of the separation for free with usr/lib vs usr/share, most nix packages don't have separate store paths for binary vs non-binary files. At most you'll get the headers and build scripts split off in a separate dev path.

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