home-manager to install gui applications on non nix-os distros (kbin.social)
from tr1x@kbin.social to linux@lemmy.ml on 10 Sep 2023 18:14
https://kbin.social/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/442769

I'm trying to use home-manager to install software on tumbleweed so that if I ever move to a new machine, I'd be able to install all of my software again by just running home-manager switch. For my terminal applications like zellij, zoxide, eza etc they installed and work fine.

My problem is gui applications that I've tried to install. I tried to install alacritty and awesome as I already have configs for them and wanted to move them over to being managed by nix. For alacritty, I ran into a "failed to find suitable GL configuration" error where I found this link to a github issue but beyond this, not sure how to really fix this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/230660

For both packages, I saw that alacritty was installed in nix-profile/share/application and awesome was installed in nix-profile/bin. To make awesome appear in sddm, im assuming I would need to make a custom entry in /usr/share/xsessions with exec pointing to its nix-profile location but I'm not entirely sure how to get alacritty running correctly.

I'd appreciate any help on this. Thanks in advance

Edit:
Tried out making a custom entry in usr/share/xsession and pointed it at awesome in the nix-profile/share directory but no luck getting that to be picked up by sddm

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manpacket@lemmyrs.org on 10 Sep 2023 19:05 next collapse

You need this https://github.com/guibou/nixGL

tr1x@kbin.social on 10 Sep 2023 20:03 collapse

Cheers. I think I can get that working for pulling up alacritty or wezterm with awesome or leftwm with keybinds ( just changing what's being executed when using keybinds).

Is there a way to get this running through the applications symlink? I know I could symlink the location from nix-profile to applications using
ln -s /home/$USER/.nix-profile/share/applications/* /home/$USER/.local/share/applications/
But, is there a way to run nixGL from the symlink without running the command through the terminal first?

Credit: Chris Titus Tech for his intro to the nix package manager. That's where I found the symlink command https://christitus.com/nix-package-manager/

Edit:
I use rofi as my app launcher where I could use drun to execute alacritty or wezterm using nixGL but would really appreciate if I could just select the app from the rofi menu to execute directly without specifying the extra config param each time

manpacket@lemmyrs.org on 10 Sep 2023 20:35 collapse

https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/3968 - this to monitor and poke, there are also a link for a sample wrapper that might or night not help you.

npopov@lemm.ee on 11 Sep 2023 02:32 collapse

Maybe Guix can help? Try to check Guix home.

tr1x@kbin.social on 11 Sep 2023 04:17 collapse

Thanks for the recommendation. I was looking through the packages that are available and it looks like some of the packages I use just aren't available yet (leftwm, wezterm etc). Still looks like a very good alternative to nix if the packages you want are supported