alt Hacker NewsI don’t any experience with Nix - but how does it handle software which runs its own updating processes outside the package manager? Specifically thinking about software like Discord, Slack, Docker Desktop, Jetbrains Toolbox, etc.
Is the Nix-ism to just reject using such software?
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No there’s a nerd who will obsessively submit the latest version of any popular software that does that to nixpkgs. Or suggest you use the flatpak.
That's not much different than other distros, because the way auto-update usually works, is it can't use root permissions or the system package manager (in any distro), so it has to install the newer version in $HOME. Once the update is installed, the system package becomes a trampoline to that.
I tried Discord, and this one seems to download some updates on first run, but the version sticks to the one from the system (0.0.127, latest is 0.0.129). So I assume it just doesn't update, or it tries to and fails.
For a personal desktop environment, I just install them normally when there's no up to date nixified option.
For some things I've vibe-coded a nix module on github that uses a scheduled github action to check for underlying app updates and then it generates a new hash and tags a release.
I've done that for claude code and cursor, which is also an opportunity to let me manage their config files from my nix config.
really good question.
right now I have bought into the Nix koolaid a bit.
I have NixOS Linux machines and then nix-darwin on my Mac.
I use Nix to install Brew and then Brew to manage casks for things like Chrome what I'm sure updates itself. So the "flake.lock" probably isn't super accurate for the apps you described.
So Discord, and quite a lot of software like this has actually two layers of updates. There's updates of the web page (which is basically writing a bunch of JS to the home directory) which NixOS does nothing to prevent, and then there's updates of the host program (i.e. Electron) which NixOS disables.
Jetbrains Toolbox is in a sort of different category with tools like Rustup, since it's a package manager of its own. If you manage your IDEs with Toolbox, then your IDE versions are "outside Nix" and not managed by Nix. It's just packaged into its own pretend FHS environment and then doesn't know anything about it being on Nix. That said, updates of Toolbox itself will need to happen through your package manager.
As a last comment, why run Docker Desktop on Linux at all? Like I understand on Windows and Mac - docker is inherently tied to Linux so the Windows/Mac apps abstract away the fact that it's running a VM and doing a bunch of port mapping and filesystem mounting under the hood so you can pretend it's not running on a VM, but on Linux I've always just installed docker straight onto the host.