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?
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
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
I am using qemu/KVM on NixOS to run games on with quite a good performance, so that should not be a problem
Gaming is hard on Linux? Get Wine-GE + Lutris and thats all you need