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Could you setup distrobox to run regular Linux programs?

• tombert 2y ago
  Almost certainly, though I've never tried. I'm technical enough to where making a Flake doesn't really bother me, and it's really not as hard as I was making it out if you're already familiar with functional programming, I'm just saying it's an annoyance. That said, I might need to play with Distrobox, it looks like it's in nixpkgs.
• worble 2y ago
  Yeah, that's exactly what I did for a while, but really once you get the hang of nix it's kind of unnecessary. I keep this bit of nix to hand for anything that I need to run #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }: ( let base = pkgs.appimageTools.defaultFhsEnvArgs; in pkgs.buildFHSUserEnv (base // { name = "FHS"; targetPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; [ /* add additional packages here e.g */ pcre tzdata ]); runScript = "bash"; extraOutputsToInstall = [ "dev" ]; }) ).env Running `nix-shell` will drop you into a bash shell that looks just like a normal linux distribution with a lot of common libraries (thanks to `pkgs.appimageTools.defaultFhsEnvArgs`) and after trying to run your application you can shove whatever you need in the extra packages when it complains about a dependency being missing. Obviously it's a bit more work than other distros, but once nix gets it's claws into you, you'll find it hard to go back to old ways.