Hiya! I’m following a gamedev degree in university. It’s been a major challenge doing it from Linux, as everything is Windows stuff (.sln Visual Studio projects, DirectX API, excel graphs…). However I’ve gotten by by making my own tools and dipping into WINE when it gets too difficult. I’m replacing my laptop due to...
Installing proprietary software. For certain courses I unfortunately have to use software like Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Unity, P4V, and a few others. I read NixOS has difficulty with running random binaries. I also could not find an UE5 package in nixpkgs, which Arch does have.
So NixOS is different from other distros in that it throws out the FHS so that it can do things like install multiple versions of the same library without issues; this breaks binaries, however, and they have to be patched to work with NixOS. So you basically have to package things for Nix for them to work. Certain programs like Steam and VSCode even have a wrapper as part of their setup that recreates the FHS to make them work as expected, so doing this is possible, but as a beginner I doubt you want to fuck with that.
Building binaries. I know nixos does some weird stuff with libraries and binaries. I need to be able to do normal stuff with binaries, and perhaps package and distribute them. It’d be really nice to be able to try out different compilers for my CMake/C++ projects also. Can NixOS do that easily?
It’s actually nice as a dev environment. You do have to write flakes for your projects, but that’s not a big deal and the reproducibility is nice.
VMs. I will be doing dGPU passthrough for testing assignments before handin. I assume this is no problem but it requires some weird stuff so I want to be sure before diving in!
I’ve used VMs without issue, so should be fine.
Since Nix is a distro-agnostic package manager, in your case I would probably use a normal distro like Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora and just use Nix with that if you want to go that route. It’ll go smoother than diving into the deep end right away.
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It’s the spec for how the file directories should be set up on UNIX-like systems, like how typically user binaries would go in /usr/bin and libraries for those binaries would go in /usr/lib.
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NixOS for gamedev
Hiya! I’m following a gamedev degree in university. It’s been a major challenge doing it from Linux, as everything is Windows stuff (.sln Visual Studio projects, DirectX API, excel graphs…). However I’ve gotten by by making my own tools and dipping into WINE when it gets too difficult. I’m replacing my laptop due to...