nixGL VS napalm

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

I created https://github.com/nmattia/napalm/issues/34 and https://github.com/nmattia/naersk/issues/183 to move them to nix-community

Sure. NPM is the easy case because the package-lock.json file can easily be read by Nix and contains hashes for all of the packages. This means that simply be importing the file into Nix you can have a reproducible build. No Nix-specific maintenance required.

In the linked case I use this library to manage that https://github.com/nmattia/napalm (in that example I use master but for production I would pin a version). It simply parses the package-lock.json, downloads the packages and uses npm to build the node_modules folder. It also provides some convenient functions for building packages with "bin" files or just linking node_modules inside a build.

Note that this is more for project development. It doesn't use the "system" packages (intentionally) for Node, it fetches whatever versions you have specified from NPM. Nix will only provide the "native" stuff like Node and NPM themselves and any native libraries.