Hiya! I’m following a gamedev degree in university. It’s been a major challenge doing it from Linux, as everything is Windows stuff (.sln Visual Studio projects, DirectX API, excel graphs…). However I’ve gotten by by making my own tools and dipping into WINE when it gets too difficult. I’m replacing my laptop due to hardware faults (never buying from ASUS again) and my Framework 16 preorder should arrive in a month or two.

I’m considering trying out NixOS. I currently have Arch on the laptop because it makes it easy to get recent versions of libraries and compilers. However, I’ve had lots of issues due to inconsistent setup (SDDM theme randomly disappears, KDE apps have black text on dark background, video encoding does not work) and I figured having a declarative config might allow me to set things up better and more consistently. I do have a few worries though, given this is new to me:

  1. Installing proprietary software. For certain courses I unfortunately have to use software like Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Unity, P4V, and a few others. I read NixOS has difficulty with running random binaries. I also could not find an UE5 package in nixpkgs, which Arch does have.
  2. Building binaries. I know nixos does some weird stuff with libraries and binaries. I need to be able to do normal stuff with binaries, and perhaps package and distribute them. It’d be really nice to be able to try out different compilers for my CMake/C++ projects also. Can NixOS do that easily?
  3. VMs. I will be doing dGPU passthrough for testing assignments before handin. I assume this is no problem but it requires some weird stuff so I want to be sure before diving in!

Am I better off just setting up a brittle Arch install again, or is NixOS worth the plunge?

  • thepiguy
    1·
    3 months ago
    1. Jetbrains toolbox is proprietary and I can still run it. You do have to explicitly state that you want proprietary software. You can even run random binaries if you setup nix-ld.
    2. The preferred way to do this is by creating a shell.nix for each of your projects with the dependencies defined within.
    3. Not sure about passthroughs, but qemu worked fine for me.

    As for nix Vs arch, I still prefer arch. This is not because nix is bad, but because I have used arch for a long time. I use nix on my laptop because I want that reliability, but I will probably never switch to nix on my desktop. I still find that I can debug my mistakes easier on arch, but with nix I can just git checkout oldcommit. With that being said, I do have a distrobox container with arch in my nix machine, if I really wanna install something quickly.