Matej

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

2. 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

3. I am using qemu/KVM on NixOS to run games on with quite a good performance, so that should not be a problem

Stop making a list and start with eg: Nix Pills

Dont know where you are getting this. Nixpkgs is a breeze to manage compared to apt repo. Also it does not matter if you are on nixos or non-nixos system, the only difference is that nix does not take care of services on its own. What kind of docs do you miss? Nix has its own extensive nix docs page, and for packaging you also have nixpkgs documentation page - also official and not much related to nixos itself. Also nix has quite good man pages.

As an ~10 year old NixOS user I appreciate your take on image based distros. My start into NixOS was not based on immutable OS, it was survivability of OS. I was searching for NixOS before I knew what NixOS is. I wanted some system that would survive me and my constant discovery of new software. It was impossible at the time and I had to reinstall whole distro every few months. I started with NixOS like with any other software - I started using it because … Curiosity. 10years ago there were no documentation or guides on the internet, everything was in the Nix code, i was reading the code until my eyes bled, for months. Eventually I figured out that even if i play around with kernel modules, I simply can not brick this OS.

Some time back (a year or two) I was using Fedora Silverblue on my work pc… because I thought that will be more supported in terms of software that can run on the system. Boy oh boy I was wrong. For every system package i had to reboot, package management UI was for Flatpak, to install userlevel packages I had to use some other way… And to make things worse… It died on me some day after upgrade… I switched to NixOS. Smooth sailing ever since…

I use Sway to great success. Gnome extensions are quite limited. Hyprland seems ok but the time that i was trying to use it (several months back) it had severe issues in release and trunk revisions. Specially with multimonitor setup, like the screen locker that they recommend in documentation is crashing after sleep if on multimonitor setup, i lost trust in Hyprland after that security issue.

I cant remember anymore… Let me explain … My first computer was with at-the-time-very-new windows xp, using primary for games, after some time it got bloated with stuff so i had to reinstall again and again over time. Then i discovered redhat,centos and debian… I started heavily distro hopping. My passion for software grew to the point that I was installing new software on daily basis, just to explore new things. But nothing seemed stable enough, ubuntu, fedora, sabayon, gentoo, arch… And their derivatives all broke under my fingers to the point that i had to do more fixing than discovering new software, I took it as a challenge and continue. At around the time of university I discovered NixOS, as with any new technology I went head on with it. It took a lot of trial and error since at the time there were no documentation for any of it. I spent months reading the code, but I never gave up, since what I have found was a gem. I found the OS that is resistant to my curiosity, I just cant seem to be able to break it. Now I use NixOS everywhere that I can, even on my work computer. I do not need to reinstall after initial installation. Well… only when hardware fails…

In i3wm/swaywm, hyprland, … You can assign workspaces to outputs (monitors)

Depends, does your CPU has already one?

Yes, if you run a non optimized VM everything will be slow. It took me few weeks at start to discover all optimisation options for qemu/kvm and then years of perfecting it to make it run very close to bare metal

Edit: the key is to pass through one of your graphic cards

Zsh and Starship.rs on top with few extra minor things. I like my shell fast and clean.

All those points assume that you would have compatible apps for both platforms. For some small subset of applications might work… Like VLC player, Firefox, Chromium browsers, … You could try to run Windows apps with Wine, but that can be done on app basis and will not be generic

What do you mean, what do you think is so special about Photoshop? I play Starfield on Ultra on Windows inside Qemu/KVM virtual machine on Linux.

I used to have Silverblue for my work laptop OS, I broke it quite fast, multiple times, got annoyed, switched to NixOS like on my home setup. I am the person that tinkers with everything, and NixOS just wont die. I need to install it only once per computer’s drive lifetime.

Is it still necessary to reboot if you install/update/remove some system package?

Both have issues, just that X11 has old issues that rarely someone is workin on, while Wayland has new ones and people are fixing them. So Wayland for me, thank you.

Are you using HDMI? Try display port. (Its an old post but maybe related) https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/w3ug4q/enabling_amds_freesync_on_sway/

As a Linux user I can tell you that nothing works. Every single Linux distro requires some amount of work. That’s why I do not use Windows or MacOS since it is so closed ecosystem that you can’t even fix anything when something fails.

I was a distro hopper once, then I saw the light of NixOS…