Has Nix package manager been considered as a pre-installed package manager for Ublue Images ? Could it be an interesting way to get packages that are not available as flatpak? Would it be possible and a good idea to have an Appstore similar to Bazaar to download and install Nix packages?
I have found most my answers on Github, the ublue team does not want to support Nix. I am ok with this. I am curious of the reasoning behind this but I understand that a projet must have well defined goals and priorities. link: Include smallest pieces necessary to make installing Nix easier · Issue #765 · ublue-os/main · GitHub
We have no interest on supporting it. It doesn’t provide us really anything.
As said in that thread, if we would allow the /nix to exist, it would mean people would ask as about it once something doesn’t work.
So nope, nix won’t be included in our images.
My simple thinking is that there is no real need to have nix package manager pre-installed. At least for me it is fine, in simple words, to have flatpak for GUI apps and brew for CLI apps.
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@Reivilo what is a use case for Nix that you couldn’t do with flatpak, distrobox, or brew?
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When choosing a Linux distribution or image, I prioritize a plug-and-play experience with automatic updates and easy maintenance. My goal is to use the same, hassle-free operating system on my own PC and on the computers of my less tech-savvy relatives.
I successfully use Bazzite and Flatpak to install most of my software. However, I run into issues with my primary use case: audio production using Renoise and Reaper. Specifically, the various audio plugins I need (VST, LV2, CLAP, VST3) currently don’t integrate well with Flatpak.
I currently use DistroShelf via Arch Linux to manage these audio tools, and while it works, the setup process is too complex. Although I’m comfortable with Arch, I feel there should be a simpler solution. I also strongly dislike AppImages, with Citra being the only exception I use.
I see Flatpak as the future of user-friendly Linux (offering great compatibility), but it’s currently falling short in this area. This has led me to explore Nix. Given its massive repository of over 120,000 packages, I wonder if Nix could be a more user-friendly and complementary solution to fill the gaps left by Flatpak. Especially via a GUI app store. I am also wondering if other users have different uses-cases wich would be covered by that solution.
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Nix packages is great. I would try it if I would miss anything, but I am quite happy with Flatpak, brew and distrobox.
EDIT: When you go the way to install Nix packages please be aware that here we have SELinux and, I don’t actually know for sure, but it could be that one has to deal with problems coming up in this area.
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If it helps, I used a distrobox to set up Reaper with Carla and all my plugins, for use with live audio recording and production. I used Debian, but I’m sure any distro would have been fine. I installed Reaper from the .tar.xz and exported the app.
This was in 2024 on a previous laptop, so I don’t have the ability to go back and check my config - the above is from my notes at the time.
I’m using nix-portable in some cases to run some tools which I describe a bit at Nix installation is gone after getting Fedora 42 - #3 by jcrben
Definitely not a huge fan of homebrew, altho I’ve used it for a long time and still do for a few small things. But for some projects it wants to pull in a ton of dependencies which just gets messy.
For example, if I install gopass, homebrew will install all these dependencies:
==> Installing dependencies for gopass: ca-certificates, gmp, libunistring, libidn2, libtasn1, nettle, libffi, p11-kit, openssl@3, libevent, libnghttp2, expat, unbound, zlib, gnutls, libgpg-error, libassuan, libgcrypt, libksba, bzip2, pcre2, dbus, ncurses, readline, libxcrypt, sqlite, util-linux, mpdecimal, xz, lz4, zstd, berkeley-db@5, libedit, unzip, python@3.14, glib, libcap, systemd, libusb, npth, libsecret, pinentry, keyutils, krb5, cyrus-sasl, openldap and gnupg
And if I uninstall gopass, it will try to automatically remove all of them, but in some cases they may leave leftover artifacts - for example you’ll get messages like this:
Uninstalling /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/ca-certificates/2025-12-02... (4 files, 236KB)
Warning: The following ca-certificates configuration files have not been removed!
If desired, remove them manually with `rm -rf`:
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/etc/ca-certificates
/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/etc/ca-certificates/cert.pem
I find it just messy and confusing. I use nix-portable to run gopass and all its dependencies are self-contained inside the nix system. Granted, all these dependencies are sort of “self-contained” in homebrew. But then I might install another thing and it might depend on gnutls - but both have to share the same version of gnutls. That sharing requirement, and lack of flexibility in running different versions side-by-side, is one of the motivations behind things like flatpak and nix to begin with.
I’m also doing some more systemsy development inside a distrobox - for now wrote a wrapper script to clean it out. Also exploring going further by doing more stuff inside an actual virtualbox - but haven’t figured out which I like best: (1) virt-manager, lima, or just quickemu.
Haven’t open-sourced my dotfiles and local set up scripts yet, would like to at some point but would need to carefully go over it - I do by default put the sensitive stuff in a separate repo but reluctant to share everything about how I work.
it seems like fedora 44 is getting better support for nix. Changes/Nix package tool - Fedora Project Wiki . I haven’t installed it so I don’t know much. You can also get it working currently, I think you need to create the /nix directory with a custom image if I remember correctly a post I saw about it.
I found playing with ublue recipes were a good window into setting up NixOS. Nothing stopping you forking your favourite Ublue project and attaching nix pkgs to it. Gives you a nice easy base, and you can just pop an import into it and manage the nix side separately to help keep things clean. I’ve learnt a lot of from ublue like just files, and taken it to nix, and it’s a game changer.
Feel free to try or fork my Bluefin DX spin with Nix support baked in: GitHub - randogoth/deinonyxus: Bluefin DX spin with Nix support
It incorporates the approach worked out by the maker of the Daemonix ublue image and adds home-manager and some nixpkgs.
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