[zamalek]

> I've found the Nix ecosystem to be lacking, missing packages, wrongly built packages

This is an interesting problem you've faced, their marketing claim is that they have the most comprehensive catalog of packages (and I'm inclined to believe it). I very rarely run into broken packages, and that's usually resolved by using a stable release for that specific package - and it's not like my usage of packages is lightweight (7292 lines of nix config). That's on NixOS (and Silverblue, and Ubuntu) at least.

[mmgutz]

That's on NixOS, but on other distros there are issues. When I tried nix last year, installing alacritty, for example, required an opengl wrapper. Neovim couldn't compile plugins without environment hackery.

Things just work with pacman or dnf.

[mikepurvis]

The non-NixOS OpenGL/gpu story is unfortunately tricky as it requires a binary matchup between a userspace library and the kernel driver—which on non-NixOS is unknown to the Nix package manager since it's being managed by whatever the host is.

This is arguably a flaw in how Nvidia architected this, but it is what it is. The classical solution is nixGL [1], but this requires downloading special nixified versions of the libraries on every host system kernel change. An alternative option that I was involved in the development of is nix-gl-host [2], which manipulates the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for a Nix executable to allow it to link patched versions of the host's own userspace GL libraries.

[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL

[2]: https://github.com/numtide/nix-gl-host