They said Nix, so I was thinking about macOS + nix-darwin when I wrote that.

You're right. When I tried using NixOS as my main desktop experience for a few months, I ended up with a custom derivation for various apps I used. That's probably why I made the claude code and cursor modules in the first place.

But I'm also remembering I made my own keepassxc module because keepassxc wants to be able to write to its config file, but I also want to configure it from nix, so I had to make my module use an activation-time script to merge nix config into the keepassxc config file.

I lost interest in NixOS for day to day personal computing, though vibe-coding modules like that wasn't as big of a dealbreaker as there being almost zero laptops that compete with a Macbook.

The other pain is Linux desktop environment stuff in general like dealing with interactions between a Steam game, wayland, and wayland-satellite. Though NixOS helped there since it was easy for an AI agent to investigate the issue, inspect the nix config, and make a targeted, commented patch that shows up in git.

Usually u can run almost any binary by setting up once a fhs. Or using steam-run

And there's also nix alien and similar tools as alternative

But indeed usually you end up using patchelf , tell the inputs of a binary n just make a regular nix package from it