nixGL VS Home Manager using Nix

How can a program accomplish this? by using/doing something like virtualization? emulation? syscall/API translation? e.g. like WINE?

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

Essentially, running stuff that needs GL graphics is a bit funky... There's a workaround called nixGL though.

I think installing Calibre is a good use case for installing Nix (www.nixos.org).

Unfortunately, you might also need https://github.com/guibou/nixGL to run graphical apps under Nix. It's a shell script to use the correct OpenGL library.

Try the NixGL wrapper.

Are you running the Nix package manager on not-NixOS? If so I recall needing NixGL for OpenGL integration.

$ nix-channel --list home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-22.05.tar.gz nixgl https://github.com/guibou/nixGL/archive/main.tar.gz nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable

Needs a separate program to run GUI applications on non-NixOS systems

IMO the proper solution to this is Nix/Guix, since they have the best of both worlds (sharing libraries where possible, but allowing different versions where needed). Shame that libGL is a mess and as such is difficult to get right in this way, and as such you need hacks like https://github.com/guibou/nixGL for most GUI stuff. That said, people are working on improving the situation.

I get what you mean, but keep in mind that for every distro you're reliant on the community to get nvidia support integrated. Also if you only have few apps that require it, then the nixGL flake is not bad. https://github.com/guibou/nixGL

nix-channel --add https://github.com/guibou/nixGL/archive/main.tar.gz nixgl && nix-channel --update warning: unable to download 'https://cache.nixos.org/v5djb4jw3hg4brdbidqaspin8n8isyq6.narinfo': SSL peer certificate or SSH remote key was not OK (60); retrying in 259 ms these derivations will be built: /nix/store/gm6gq44ivdqgmrsvlsr08d2nqjircgds-nixgl.drv building '/nix/store/gm6gq44ivdqgmrsvlsr08d2nqjircgds-nixgl.drv'... while setting up the build environment: executing '/bin/bash': No such file or directory builder for '/nix/store/gm6gq44ivdqgmrsvlsr08d2nqjircgds-nixgl.drv' failed with exit code 1 error: build of '/nix/store/gm6gq44ivdqgmrsvlsr08d2nqjircgds-nixgl.drv' failed error: program '/usr/bin/nix-build' failed with exit code 100

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.