#nixgl — Public Fediverse posts

I think while #Nix promises to be a #Linux distro-agnostic package manager a la #Flatpak, 'cept it's suited for both graphical and terminal applications (instead of only the former, like Flatpaks).. it's def not there yet.

While it seems non-graphical packages are installed/usable perfectly (in most cases, if not all), whether or not graphical apps u install can be used is a hit or miss, mostly missing. In some cases, you need to install something called #nixGL and it might work if you run the (graphical) app with it, which isn't ideal in terms of user-friendliness in the first place, a lot of times that additional step does not work either.

So. For graphical apps on Linux, if there's a Flatpak - prolly go for that. For non-graphical packages, if you can run/install Nix on your distro - there's no reason not to use Nix to install them. It really does feel magical when it works. On #macOS though, I see almost no reason not to continue using #Homebrew instead where it just works (with its own deficiencies) and the process of installing/setting it up is pretty simple and non-disruptive - unlike setting up Nix on macOS which I've heard is very disruptive (requiring partitioning your disk, or something like that).

Hopefully though, graphical apps would 'Just Work' with Nix on non-#NixOS distros some day - cos then all Linux distros would be 'just like #ArchLinux' with its expansive list of available packages.. without needing you to be on Arch. That'd be the day.

Graphical apps like #Alacritty now works, it just needs something called #NixGL installed, and then you have to run the application from the terminal with nixGL, example:

nixGL alacritty

~/.nix-profile/share/applications/Alacritty.desktop