nix-alien VS nixos-fhs-compat

copy the extracted files over to the nix output dir, and patch-elf all the binaries to link to the nix-version of the dynamic lib.

This sounds more difficult than it is, the result will be a copied over binary file that has its “libc.so” and other dynamic libs replaced in the ELF-header with “/nix/store/hdjdewuieu737-libc/libc.so”. I recommend looking up a package in nixpkgs which has a similar install story, that’s the easiest way to write a new package.

In case you only want to run it locally https://github.com/thiagokokada/nix-alien and similar programs work fine with the binary.

You might be interested in tools like nix-alien which help, though to some extent it's always going to be an annoyance.

There's also nix-alien to run random binaries and nixos-fhs-compat to FHS your OS (might need some tweaking).

You can, in theory, use https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat for this.

There's also nix-alien to run random binaries and nixos-fhs-compat to FHS your OS (might need some tweaking).

Thanks, it was fun working with containers in NixOS! I tweaked the config a little bit so that the DISPLAY variable is automatically set and I also added nixos-fhs-compat's modules so that the guest OS uses FHS. Overall, a very slick setup if you want to run GPU-accelerated software quickly or what to do software development in a more traditional environment.

There's buildFHSUserEnv as the proper way to run those apps, and there's also a massive hack that I don't really recommend using on your host: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat . If you want to use it, do it with something similar to this: https://github.com/balsoft/kalinix/blob/master/scripts/run-container and then run your vscode/android studio/etc inside that container. The final option is to just run another distro with docker or lxc, set up X11/Wayland passthru to it and run stubborn applications that way.

The root filesystem only contains two FHS-y symbolic links by default: /bin/sh and /usr/bin/env (and some /etc stuff that is hardcoded in some applications and wasn't considered to be worth patching). All the other files are kept in non-FHS-compliant locations (/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/*/default and /run/current-system/sw or /nix/var/nix/profiles/system). This means, for example, that binaries from other Linux distros won't run unless they have been statically compiled with musl (because there's no dynamic linker at /lib/ld-linux.so.2). There's this hack courtesy of Matthew Bauer that links stuff to FHS locations: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat , but it's not supported upstream and it doesn't change how all the internal Nix stuff works, it's only a wrapper to allow running FHS and LSP-reliant binaries.