nix allows for flakes which are 100% reproducible (ie. you copy paste a flake it would do the intended stuff only) , this make me realize that now we can have flakes for games like do you want inscryption , sure add this flake and this would install all dependencies and lutris etc. and you just have to link us to the gog-games.to / fitgirl-repack / dodi-repack variant (preferrably , gog-games.to since you can verify it with gog) (i have picked only the goat of gaming piracy from megathread) , imo this can give huge boost to gaming in linux and wine is literally really close to giving native performance and you wont even see the difference
the same logic can be applied to ms excel , powerpoint etc. but i dont see the point after using libreoffice (literally the best thing ever)
I only understand half of these words but I noticed Inscryption, so you got me.
What are flakes and what does it mean to be reproducible?
Nix is a functional programming language / package manager, which allows you to build software reproducible.
For example, one developer has version 1.1 of a dependency installed and a second developer has version 1.2 of the same dependency installed. Both build the software from source and get a different result.
This can lead to “but it works on my machine” bugs. Nix mitigates this and ensures that all devs have the exact same versions and the build process produces the same output.
In theory these kind of bugs can now only happen because of hardware fault.
For game piracy this should streamline the installation process. You can just run one command and the game works and you don’t have to tinker around to find out why it does not work for you.
Flakes is a way to manage nix, nix is essentially a package manager, NixOS would be probably easiest way to play with these tools.
You define a flake / nix configuration and they are designed to be installable on any system. Think of it as if you install and configure all of your programs, services, environment in it and you upgrade to a new PC, you run a command to install your flake from your previous PC and everything is configured how you had it on your previous PC.
Flakes is a new tool and is under rapid development, so it may have breaking changes in the future, but it is so popular that the devs are trying not to break it as much as possible.
Also take my comment as a grain of salt since while I know about flakes and use it, I am nowhere close to an expert on it and terms that I used may be incorrect especially for defining them, but in layman’s terms I think its a decent introduction to what it is.