Support for GUI apps

[Sh4rK]

Hi!

I just found this a few days ago, and it's pretty cool, I like that it's nix-based but can be installed and ran without any root privileges. Also that it materializes the result faster than nix itself :D

I was wondering if you're interested in supporting GUI apps, by passing through and/or adding the necessary env vars and fs binds? I managed to make this work on a NixOS host using Codex, but it didn't work on an Ubuntu host, I guess it's easier to forward the same environment that the nix packages already expect.

If you are open to supporting this, I might work a bit more to try to make it work, let me know what you think!

[figsoda]

What GUI apps did you run into issues with, and what are the error messages?

I tried inlyne and nemo on x86_64 NixOS, and they seemd to work as expected.

[Sh4rK]

I tried VS Code, for example. The reason for it is that I was trying solutions that can set up a developer environment, without root (many other similar tools need Nix installed, which requires access to create /nix). But because the env runs inside bubblewrap, the normally installed VS code can't reach inside it for tools needed by plugins, like golangci-lint.

I guess this could be solved in other ways as well, like having an "unnix run ..." command and overriding the path in VS Code settings.

[figsoda]

I'm not sure that I understand the issue. Could you go through the steps to reproduce this?

Unnix tries to overlay on top of existing nix stores, and since nix-daemon runs outside the unnix shell, programs within an unnix shell should still be able to mutate the nix store through nix-daemon.

I was able to run vscodium through unnix on my machine and run nix commands in its terminal normally.

[Sh4rK]

I tested it some more on an Ubuntu 25.10 machine.

Some apps work, for example Gnome Calculator runs and is usable (though it does print some warnings about missing TLS support (for downloading currency rate files)).

Zed does not print anything, and does not work. The task bar shows an app with a missing (gear) icon, with "Unknown" title, but no visible windows.

VS Codium did not work at first:

$ cat unnix.kdl
packages {
  vscodium
}
$ unnix env
$ codium --verbose
[19804:0430/114945.815843:FATAL:sandbox/linux/suid/client/setuid_sandbox_host.cc:166] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /nix/store/7ay6p3i8nn9nnxx2kwhh4w43997qfa0k-vscodium-1.112.01907/lib/vscode/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.

But seeing this, I tried it with --no-sandbox and it does work that way!

So the issue wasn't that it's a GUI app, and I'm not sure the sandboxing error is solvable without root.

That leaves Zed not working, but that's a more specific thing, so feel free to close this issue :)

[figsoda]

Seems like the issue might be specific to non-NixOS systems. I don't have a good way to test on non-NixOS systems right now, feel free to open a pull request if you are able to find a fix.

The issue seems to be caused by bubblewrap, I opened #52 to look for alternative backends