Creating nix packages is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Maybe a tiny bit more involved than AUR packages since it's a new language and all, b

Creating nix packages is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Maybe a tiny bit more involved than AUR packages since it's a new language and all, but it's not that much more difficult. When I was using nixos on my desktop machine, I made packages for my own personal tools, so it integrated in the system. It's also very easy to customize a package to suit your needs, and in fact makes for a very nice system to hack on open source projects. You can mostly setup an override in your $HOME to make a package's source come from your local disk, and when you install the package it will compile locally instead of getting a prebuilt binary. If you don't go through their packaging system... It's really easy to end up in a mess. There are ways to simulate a "normal" linux from within nixos, essentially making a chroot in which the various libraries are in their normal locations (achieved through an overlay filesystem). I believe that's what they do to run the Steam client. I assume (though never tried) you could use this to run other binaries without packaging. But then... what's the point?