NixOS Hates Precompiled Programs (Learn How To Fix It)
I’ve been using NixOS for about six months and am generally satisfied with my experience. However, in this essay, I won’t talk about how great NixOS is, but rather about one common issue that many users, including myself, have faced or will face in the future.
In NixOS, most pre-compiled programs will not work out of the box. In this essay, I’ll share my experiences on this issue and explain why it happens, along with some approaches I’ve found very helpful to overcome it. Hopefully, this will help others avoid some of the frustrations I’ve encountered.
Let’s say that you’re working on a project. Maybe using Node. You decide to try out a library. You write some code. And then, once you try to run your script, you get the following error:
Being a smart person, you suspect this might be related to NixOS. You begin researching the issue, only to find people suggesting case-specific solutions such as [1] and [2]. Sure, in this case, using the Chromium installed on your system instead of the built-in version that comes with Puppeteer, and specifying the executablePath property to its path in your Node code when initializing Puppeteer can save the day.
