New to NixOS; literally just installed and wanted to see if Balena worked, since I take it as a bad sign for the distro when it doesn’t like Ubuntu.
I tried via GUI. Didn’t work. Vie chmod in terminal. Didn’t work. there appears to be no method to make this file executable that works. Tried sudo chmod +x, chmod a+x, chmod r+ox, chmod 777, and by clicking the execute as program box in the GUI. Tried runing in terminal and by double clicking.
Definitely a bad sign when the first thing I try is already broken out of the box.
This is not actually a problem with executable permissions but rather that the appimage assumes that your system uses the FHS, and NixOS does not. You have to use appimage-run for it to work or package it with appimageTools.
To run it right now enter a shell with appimage-run in PATH using nix-shell -p appimage-run then execute appimage-run on the appimage you downloaded from the internet.
Well, appimage-run and appimageTools don’t exist. There also appears to be no package manager or software manager on the system, so can’t download anything either.
Definitely unimpressed with NixOS. Off to find another distro, that’s the solution to the problem. I’m looking for one that works; not one that lacks basic functionality required in an operating system. No disk manager, no software manager, what exactly can one do with NixOS since you can’t run anything except preinstalled software?
When you accuse NixOS of “lacking basic functionality” I get the feeling you don’t know much about how it operates under the hood. Maybe I am wrong? According to repology.org nixpkgs contains over 80k packages and is the largest repository out there. So there certainly has to be some kind of package manager, right? Blaming NixOS of having no package manager at all is, I don’t know, silly?
It’s true, NixOS is quite different when compared to your standard garden variety distro. One of its core features e.g. is its declarative approach, which means you declare/describe how you want your system to be and which applications you want to use and Nix (the package manager) takes care of the rest.
So, if you’re serious about learning how NixOS works, why don’t you give it a fair try and read some ot the documentation, too? I recommend the Wiki for your particular issue with AppImages. A good first read is also NixOS & Flakes Book - An unofficial book for beginners as well as the relevant section about package management in the official Manual, for obvious reasons.
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