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Comment by sandreas | Hacker News Reader

The main reason I ditched NixOS was the missing ability to run dynamically linked executables by default and not wanting to deal with the possible fixes.

Good to See that there is hope for that.

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You ditched NixOS for the very reason it was created. Not being able to run binaries with missing libraries is a feature. The idea is to make you aware of your implicit dependencies, and to force you to make them explicit.

This makes me wonder if you were subjected to false advertising.

Maybe. I was drawn in by the reproducable setup routine that can't break the existing system.

I didn't think too mich about how it is achieved.

Advertising in the Nix space is wild. I first learned about it in the realm of reproducible builds as well, which feels more like a “nix the language” feature

This led me to install nixos which is really kind of an output of that design, a distribution built from nixpgks. There are some rough spots that make it hard for a daily driver.

That distro is a bit much for my needs and I have retreated back to a home-manager cross platform setup for my arch/debian/macos systems, and it turns out the entire reason I started looking at Nix (builds) went nowhere

Getting adoption for Nix builds at work or with my OSS projects is has been hard. Docker is everywhere and easy, while Nix feels like a fractured and poorly documented ecosystem.

I know it’s not a default, but `buildFHSUserEnv` is probably what you would have been interested in.

There is also `nix-alien` (I am the author BTW), that automates the process of listing all program dynamic libraries (as long they're not loaded at runtime) and creating the `shell.nix` file with `buildFHSUserEnv`.

And also `programs.nix-ld` now, that allow you to impurely include libraries available to all programs. It does some LD_LIBRARY_PATH hacks, but AFAIK it worked well enough for me when I had this in my system (I don't anymore since I barely run dynamically linked executable from other sources).

Thanks. Try `tone`[1] my pet project. I'm pretty sure it won't work without tinkering out of the box. Since I need a dev machine, that supports my FOSS projects, NixOS is not for me :-) BTW it was not the ONLY reason, I ditched it, but the main reason. There were a lot of nice advantages to NixOS, but they did not outweight the issues I personally had.

1: https://github.com/sandreas/tone

> I'm pretty sure it won't work without tinkering out of the box

This worked OOTB:

    curl -L -O https://github.com/sandreas/tone/releases/download/v0.2.4/tone-0.2.4-linux-arm64.tar.gz
    tar xzf tone-0.2.4-linux-arm64.tar.gz
    nix run github:thiagokokada/nix-alien -- ./tone-0.2.4-linux-arm64/tone --help

Which is nice because:

a) I didn't know about tone

b) I am in the process of sorting out some tagging of my personal music so tone looks like exactly what I need and will come in super handy

So, thanks!

You're welcome. Maybe use 0.2.5 then, i probably forgot to update the readme :-)

You can use nix on FHS OS as well

steam-run solves this for me at least.

Seconded. Despite sounding like it's only a tool for games, `steam-run` is very useful for generally running foreign binaries on NixOS. There's also `nix-ld`: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-ld

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