Introduction

NixOS is very strict in its approach to system purity; there is essentially no global environment, and this also means that a lot of assumptions about what a 'standard Linux system' looks like, do not hold up when you are using NixOS. This is a common cause of problems, when people try to run software on NixOS that was not specifically packaged for it.

In this chapter, we'll go through a few ways in which you can deal with this situation, depending on what format your software is available in.