So I realised I forgot to update on the Nix OS situation. Unfortunately, I ended up running out of time to get things working properly, I really needed Blender in particular this week for work for some complex scenes, and it just wasn't looking like I'd be able to get it workable in time, so I begrudgingly went back to Windows.
I'm not giving up though, this is just temporary, when I get some spare time I'm planning to create a partition for Nix OS and keep tinkering, and I have my config backed up so I can just pick up where I left off. I also successfully installed Nix OS on an older laptop I had laying around which doesn't have any Nvidia hardware, and it went super smoothly and I'm still really loving the OS there.
for those interested in what was happening, when I made this post, the issue was actually something really simple, I just misread the wiki's instructions about how to set up Nvidia Prime lol. My laptop has an integrated intel GPU and the main Nvidia one, and NixOS was exclusively using the intel one. Turns out I just had my config set to Offload mode, but didn't specify anything could use the Nvidia GPU.
At first I swapped it to synced mode but this caused really bad jittering and flickering on the screen. Reverse Sync had the same issue, so I went back to offload mode and actually specified which programs were to use the Nvidia GPU this time, and ran into a bunch of new problems.
Steam and all of the games I tried worked wonderfully right out of the gate, so did Davinci, which I was a bit surprised about (though I didn't do anything particularly heavy to test it) so there was progress at least. Blender and OBS though were still mostly unusable. Blender was running slower than before with everything except rendering, and it still couldn't see the Nvidia GPU as an option for CUDA rendering in the system settings (Now that I'm back on windows I noticed that apparently the intel gpu is also CUDA compatible, but it couldn't see that either). OBS could no longer record my screen or specific windows at all either.
Like I said, I kind of just ran out of time. My plan B had actually been to install Pop_OS if Nix didn't work out since I had gotten that to work on an older PC with a Nvidia GPU in the past, but I couldn't get my drawing tablet to work with it, so I ended up just biting the bullet and going back to windows (I miss not having ads everywhere 😭). There were a bunch of other issues that I was also running into with NixOS as well (e.g. every few startups my wifi card stopped being recognised and the laptop was generally running very hot even when it wasn't doing anything), so for now I'm back on Windows, but I'm keen to keep trying to work this out once I have more free time.
#linux #nixos #update
(vivek)
