I’ve been using Nix and NixOS for 4 years now. While I like using it for my PCs and tried using it for servers with success, I think its ecosystem still is immature for development and production purposes, and thus my passion for Nix has faded.
So my question is what keeps you using Nix or NixOS? How have you been using it? Do you still feel passion and hype for it?
You don’t need it often. Just if you are running pre-built binaries. There are other ways to work around it but steam-run is a big hammer that basically sets up an environment that looks like a “regular” distro with a bunch of command libraries available for running that command.
One example I had in web-dev was Prisma which wants to download some pre-built binaries when installed via npm. These are available in nixpkgs (and I am now using these) but the first way to get it working was just to run it via steam-run.
Interesting. I think I understand. Would using distrobox with Arch or Ubuntu be another way to make a environment that would work?
I don’t know much about distrobox but probably. It seems like distrobox would be a bit more isolated from the host system. (Which can be both a prod or a con depending on your use case.) steam-run will also reuse the host libraries rather than downloading a new copy so it will be more efficient.