Fallback to non-GPU mode

[ShalokShalom]

Hi there :)

We are building a distribution with home manager as the packaging solution.

It will be managed by a graphical software center, so people will click on a "Install" button and expect the app to run flawlessly from there.

I stand in front of the challenge, to make that work with GPU rendered applications.

I know I can do that with NixGL, but I dont want to track down every single application to mark it as "GPU" application, and then add it as such to the config.

I hope you can tell me, that there is a very easy way to fallback to 'non-GPU' mode, if an application doesn't need it, so I can wrap all of them with NixGL.

Thanks a lot

[exzombie]

In my experiments, wrapping them all is won't break "non-GPU" applications, you can do it without problems. What might happen is that non-nix executables provided by the host OS are broken when they are started by wrapped applications. But that is an orthogonal issue that has nothing to do with whether an app requires GPU or not.

For example, if you want to run alacritty from nixpkgs, you must wrap it because it uses GPU. This is pretty much equivalent to wrapping everything because alacritty is a terminal emulator and effectively everything started from it is going to be wrapped. But starting a non-nixpkgs program from this terminal may or may not work, depending on your host OS. For this reason, people avoid wrapping everything, and wrapping apps that start other apps.

[ShalokShalom]

It would be way easier to automate, like when you implement a GUI for the package management