It's really 50 years of Unix's dumb practice of installing everything at absolute paths in `/usr` that has come home to roost. I wonder if Nix will finally make people write relocatable apps.

The opposite. Everything must be in /nix.

No, each Nix app gets its own tree root. (Honestly the same thing Mac, Android, etc., also do, so not such a strange idea.)

It's designed like that because of this issue. They obviously don't want to do that, but if they don't install everything in global absolute paths then too much badly written software breaks.

It's a symptom, not a cause.

I'm currently experiencing this with a Tauri-based app. Nix has been great for us for local dev and service builds, but building an application inside of Nix that needs to run outside of it has been challenging to say the least.

Yeah, I just went through this process myself on steam deck and the fact it can't access opengl or vulkan natively makes anything that isn't terminal based a massive pain in the ass.

There is nixgl which you can wrap around any executable to make it work and it's got support in home-manager (https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.xhtml#o...) but it's a huge annoyance having to wrap `config.lib.nixGL.wrap <package>` around everything you want to install.

It really depends on how you start your programs. If you wrap your compositor with nixgl then everything started through your compositior inherits the relevant env vars (LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc.) and you don't have to wrap the programs separately.

Did you try https://github.com/numtide/nix-gl-host/ to help with nix & opengl drivers on non-nixos distros?