Is there anything significant on nix that's unavailable with Pacman or Discovery? Seems it's more like a traditional package manager with more mainline Linux repositories.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
53 points (98.2% liked)
Steam Deck
14797 readers
81 users here now
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to the Steam Deck in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Pacman isn't available on SteamOS without unlocking developer mode. Nix is intended to be used alongside the native package manager. Discover (not Discovery) on SteamOS is for Flatpak packages.
I've been in developer mode on betas for a while so I wasn't aware that wasn't the vanilla experience. Having a relatively normal Linux package manager could be nice as an easy alternative to Discover.
I'm curious what would be worth getting through nix though. I suppose anything that isn't on Discover, but I haven't had too hard a time finding what I've wanted so far.
I've been hearing a lot about Nix package manager, NixOS, and immutable/atomic Linux distros like BlendOS, VanillaOS, and ChimeraOS with containers and flatpaks on top.
I may be confused but I think conceptually these distributions are moving towards this idea of reproducibility with a strong immutable core OS for the sake of stability. I can see why this would be perfect for an appliance like the Deck.
The idea of a rolling distribution where my configuration simply survives upgrades forever ... sounds like a dream come true. Is it possible?
oooh, this would be SUPER helpful; most of what I want is available as a flatpak but for the few things that aren't, nix would be a great tool to install user apps without messing with "valve's area".
awesome
That's amazing. Now when I get paged while playing Diablo I can just switch to desktop mode and nix-env -i awscli.