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Why aren't more people using NixPKGs?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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If you use any accelerated graphics (GTK4 anyone?), you cannot and must not bundle all your dependencies.
Conceptually, graphics drivers have two parts: The part in the kernel (e.g. amdgpu), and the part loaded as a library from the system into the application (e.g. Mesa).
Mesa - or any other GL/Vulkan implementation - is loaded from the system into the application as a library. Mesa relies on system libc, system LLVM (!!!!), a particular libc++, etc.
If you ship libGL (and LLVM etc), you must re-release your software with upgraded deps whenever new graphics cards are released (and should whenever bugs are fixed). Your software is literally incompatible with (some) newer computers.
For the proprietary Nvidia libGL - which, again relies on system glibc - you can't legally include it.
Flatpak solves this by separating out 'graphics driver libraries' as a unique type of runtime, and having a shitload of special rules & custom hacks to check the system libGL, open source or proprietary, maybe substitute a Flatpak provided libGL, with all the deps that libGL needs, and make it compatible with whatever app & whatever app runtime.
Actually correctly solving the libGL debacle is half the value of Flatpak to me.