Remember the days when everyone and their pet iguana was raving about Arch Linux? You couldn't escape the ever-so-subtle "I use Arch BTW" remarks in every Linux forum. Well, move over, Arch, because NixOS is here to steal your thunder! Nowadays, it seems that you can't browse YouTube or read a blog without stumbling upon someone extolling the virtues of NixOS and how it is the epitome of computing perfection. But hey, who needs critical analysis when we can jump on the hype train and declare NixOS as the new Arch? Because that's exactly what's going on. NixOS has now become the self-proclaimed prodigy that's poised to dethrone Arch Linux as the holy grail of Linux distributions. The time is calling, my friends! It's time for you – the seasoned Linux enthusiast – to dust off your keyboard warrior capes and embark on a new crusade. So, grab your Tux plushie (or, your pitchforks if you belong to the world of devils) and let's embark on an adventure through the enigmatic world of NixOS (and let the memes commence)!
  • hschen@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    I installed NixOS on a laptop and tried to run a steam game and it just straight up didn’t launch anything, went to the wiki to figure out the amd drivers, opengl whatever put like 10 new lines in my nix config rebuilt restarted still nothing works, after about 2 hours i just swapped back to arch and the games launched straight away, so for me it wasnt as easy as you may claim it to be. I also tried it on my desktop before and it was a better experience, but still not great. The nix config file is a bit of a mess of options that you have to dig into wiki pages and searching stuff to figure out how to get some stuff to work

    • AtemuEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      If you’re on AMD, all you have to do is programs.steam.enable = true;. Not dozens of lines copied from some wiki. I should know because that’s all I do in my config to enable Steam on my AMD system: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/450bf3710c77818436f1459e3ea36bf087b6e56b/configs/HEPHAISTOS/default.nix#L16 (L17-L29 are optional customisation).

      What may or may not work is doing everything programs.steam.enable does internally yourself like some outdated wiki entry might suggest you to do. Given you claim to have been manually configuring opengl stuff for instance, there’s a good chance that’s what you did. You do not have to touch any opengl settings or put steam into environment.systemPackages.

      The entire point of NixOS modules is that we have the capability to abstract stuff like this so that you do not have to copy pasta dozens of lines from a possibly outdated unofficial wiki but can simply set one option.

      • hschen@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Im like 99% sure i did have that line in my config, and it still didnt work for whatever reason.

        Look im not saying NixOS is bad, in fact i really like the idea of it, but ive tried it about 2 times and always came upon something that didnt just work for me, and i end up going into the nixos search thing to try and find what variables i need to put in my config, and its not always 100% clear. On my desktop steam and everything worked fine but i was annoyed at some stuff and stopped using it, on my laptop it just didnt wanna launch any games, idk why exactly that happened but another distro worked fine.