programs VS nixos-homepage

To complete my view, I am not a big fan of how the bug are managed as in this issue where EA launcher is not working as intented and is still considered Platinum one year later...

In Bottles there is a "program installers" feature. One of the programs on that list is FL Studio which you can get via 1 click (here is the script that runs internally when you do that: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/programs/blob/main/Software/flstudio.yml)

I have put some work on a bottles LoL installer here. For it to be ready, some stuff needs to be ironed, but the majority of the installer is already there.

Edit: for anyone interested, here is Bottles Battle.net install script: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/programs/blob/main/Games/battlenet.yml

It looks like the only officially supported program that isn't a game is amazon music [1]. The main project for running windows on Linux has a partially working distribution of Office 365. My impression is that it sometimes works with significant manual effort, wouldn't be reliable enough to depend on without a backup system [2].

When I need Office apps to communicate with clients I use a combination of Google Docs download as docx, Office Online, and a VM.

[1]: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/programs

If you care, there won't be any substitute for keeping track of changes to the recommended install and deciding whether you do or don't want to follow suit. Luckily, the site's source is public: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/blob/master/download.tt

Wow! I can't believe I've never noticed that. For many years, the only graphical installation disk was based on Plasma, and I think it also had that tag. NixOS only started shipping a GNOME iso for installation purposes a little over a year ago (for 20.09), and I kinda never noticed.

Looks like the main reason GNOME is recommended for installation media at the moment is that it does a better job of autodetecting HiDPI displays, and then scaling appropriately: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643

There are also some packaging issues for Qt with NixOS, because Qt plugins fundamentally rely on ‘impurity’ at runtime, and the Qt framework makes promises it doesn't keep about binary compatibility.

Here are some of the relevant issues for historical context and some of the tradeoffs Nixpkgs developers have faced when it comes to handling Qt and KDE packaging:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047

I realize that may not be a fully satisfying answer as to why the GNOME-based installation graphical ISO is recommended over the Qt one because one can imagine that the Qt packaging issue should be resolved some other way, or see the difficulty of packaging Qt plugins and applications in Nixpkgs as fundamentally a Nix defect. But I hope it makes that decision make more sense.

FWIW, afaict Plasma is the more popular of the two major DEs on NixOS, and it's what I've always used on NixOS myself, including now. It is definitely usable.

Looks like there's already a related issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/issues/745