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Comment by justoreply | Hacker News Reader

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justoreply·

you can't run binaries built for other distributions, without patching them

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Not true: there are many tools that allows directly running any binary, like nix-autobahn [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Lassulus/nix-autobahn

or https://github.com/Mic92/nix-ld or a FHS. There are many projects to help with this.

Haha, sometimes it goes the other way round.

The vpn client at work wasn't available for the latest ubuntu and the old version did not work due to changes in some libs. Wrapping it with nix providing the right libs was way easier and much more replicable than manually building the required stuff. Did in on my machine and than 3 mins to do the same for a colleague.

Sort of true, you can but it require a fhs environment setup

steam-run usually. That gives you a Ubuntu-like environment.

I wonder why Nix doesn't give every package a FHS env by default. In 2022 chroot and overlayfs should be available everywhere. Wouldn't that solve a ton of problems?

Nix has no concept of "package". Applications are defined as derivations, but so is everything else (I wouldn't want an entire FHS directory structure for, e.g., a single text file).

If you want an FHS, you can get one using a function like buildFHSUserEnv (that's defined in the Nixpkgs project; Nix itself doesn't know or care what FHS is; indeed, Nix will happily run on non-Linux platforms)

A FHS adds slight overhead to a package and to launch times. It also shadows part of the file system. For example /lib would probably be different for every other program which would be even more confusing.

They're also not implemented on macOS, since they rely on Linux sandboxing features.

Plus nix allows more than possible with FHS alone. What if your package has to use multiple versions of a single dependency? You are back to square one, for no good reason.

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