Hiya! I’m following a gamedev degree in university. It’s been a major challenge doing it from Linux, as everything is Windows stuff (.sln Visual Studio projects, DirectX API, excel graphs…). However I’ve gotten by by making my own tools and dipping into WINE when it gets too difficult. I’m replacing my laptop due to hardware faults (never buying from ASUS again) and my Framework 16 preorder should arrive in a month or two.
I’m considering trying out NixOS. I currently have Arch on the laptop because it makes it easy to get recent versions of libraries and compilers. However, I’ve had lots of issues due to inconsistent setup (SDDM theme randomly disappears, KDE apps have black text on dark background, video encoding does not work) and I figured having a declarative config might allow me to set things up better and more consistently. I do have a few worries though, given this is new to me:
- Installing proprietary software. For certain courses I unfortunately have to use software like Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Unity, P4V, and a few others. I read NixOS has difficulty with running random binaries. I also could not find an UE5 package in nixpkgs, which Arch does have.
- Building binaries. I know nixos does some weird stuff with libraries and binaries. I need to be able to do normal stuff with binaries, and perhaps package and distribute them. It’d be really nice to be able to try out different compilers for my CMake/C++ projects also. Can NixOS do that easily?
- VMs. I will be doing dGPU passthrough for testing assignments before handin. I assume this is no problem but it requires some weird stuff so I want to be sure before diving in!
Am I better off just setting up a brittle Arch install again, or is NixOS worth the plunge?
While all of it is doable, be aware that it takes time and effort to learn Nix and NixOS. It can be difficult to figure out how to get a particular environment set up properly. There is a lot of documentation, but it doesn’t always give easy answers if you have specific requirements for a particular dev environment and such.
It’s been a few years since I worked with Unity3D professionally, but I did so in NixOS with very little trouble. Rust has very good Nix infrastructure and so do many other languages. I can’t tell you anything about UE5 or the other proprietary tools, but there are FHS-compatibility helpers (steam-run usually works fine when I need to run arbitrary binaries made for ‘normal’ distros).
If you’re willing to figure things out sometimes (and especially in the beginning) and are motivated to take your OS to the next level, NixOS is definitely worth it. Been using it for many years and I can’t imagine ever using a mutable OS again as a daily driver (unless the way I use my computer drastically changes). I configured everything just the way I want it; it’s magical to have almost everything in one place and being able to try different things without fear of breaking something.
https://nixlang.wiki/en/tricks/distrobox
Not the nix way, but when you really need something to work, you can create containers of other distros.
NixOS is a Linux distro that does a lot of things differently (for the greater good), and gaming is heavily Windows thing, which is hard to do even on conventional Linux distros (its getting better tho). That said as for your points:
1a. One of the things that would help you, is programs.nix-ld.enable = true; (for more info check https://github.com/Mic92/nix-ld , but its integrated in NixOS already)
1b. UE5 pull request has some things that might help (eg: you could just try running it with steam-run): https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/124963
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Depends how you are building them, I am not a gaming developer nor tried to build a game without packaging it with Nix. But if you manage to run the UE5 I guess the procedure would be the same as long as you have all of the dependencies available for UE5
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I am using qemu/KVM on NixOS to run games on with quite a good performance, so that should not be a problem
Yeah, university is almost certainly going to expect you to be able to install Unreal or Unity, which just isn’t possible AFAIK on NixOS. NixOS is very all or nothing. You can’t just remove the restrictions for one project and hack something together to hit an assignment deadline. Theres still lots of pain points with LD_PATH and 3rd party binaries.
That said, you can use nixpkgs on non-nixos and still get reliability for Godot and other open source tools. For your case, I highly recommend dual booting, and then using nixpkgs without going full blown nixOS.
I went from Arch to NixOS and I’ve been loving it. I also had all the time on the world to dive in with several machines to fall back to.
There are a lot of layers to wade through especially when you need a specific tool like your UE5 case. As others are saying, there are ways to make everything work, nix or non-nix, it’s just more to work through after getting the bases covered.
Anecdotally, I had little trouble getting set up on my MSI laptop with an RTX2070, Primus and all. That was after learning the ropes on a Ryzen IdeaPad.
Rambling aside, I would definitely make sure to start in a non-mission-critical way, but do jump right in if you’re comfortable. Maybe if you can stomach the Asus a bit longer, or get the Framework set up and play around with the Asus. And ask plenty of questions! I know I’m not alone in jumping in on nix questions any way I can :)
