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by emosenkis 2056 days ago
I tried NixOS out for a while on my laptop. I loved the idea of an immutable system with all the config in one place. The implementation, though, was really a terrible user experience. I got past the weird config language, made a few contributions to Nixpkgs to get the packages I wanted, etc. The deal-breaker for me was the inability to run third-party binaries due to the departure from standard directory structure. After all the frustrations with NixOS, I was motivated to go to the opposite extreme so I could stop spending time maintaining my system and focus instead on the tasks that I wanted to use my system for. I've been [mostly] happily running Ubuntu LTS releases ever since.
1 comments
Ericson2314 2056 days ago
> The deal-breaker for me was the inability to run third-party binaries due to the departure from standard directory structure.

Did you know know we have FHS compat environments: buildFHSUserEnv?

This is our fallback solution for huge closed-source things like steam + its game games that we agree it doesn't make sense to repackage individually with patchelf.

I'm saying we agree and if we didn't have `buildFHSUserEnv` it would be a dealbreaker for many more than you. Please give it a shot, and us a second chance!

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xyzzy_plugh 2056 days ago
The pain I run into is that I very frequently need to use buildFHSUserEnv and it's just cumbersome enough that it's almost easier to not use Nix at all. It would be nice if there was a way to make this "just work". steam-run feels very hacky and I am loathe to use it in production, though I admit I've used it a lot.

Rewriting the library paths for a given binary also works but is cumbersome.

Ideally there would be a few extra tools in Nix to say "adopt this binary" in a similar way we can install things into our environment permanently, and to transform a binary to look for dependencies in the right places.

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emosenkis 2056 days ago
Neat. How long has that been around? I tried NixOS in mid-2016. I don't recall what package I was trying to use at the time (likely PlatformIO/Arduino or Rust ecosystems), but the only advice I remember finding was to run some utility to rewrite the paths embedded in the binary.
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