An aspect of configuring an OS with a programming language is that it pushes you to develop compsci/dev skills in order to do so effectively. (Whether or not this is a desirable aspect is user-specific and best left to discuss in a different thread if so desired)
It turns out that this option does relate to which packages your system profile depends on (“install” has no coherent meaning in NixOS). For services.pipewire.alsa.support32Bit, it’s best to lookup the option source.
- There are many ways to find the source, but
man configuration.nixwill tell you that this option is declared in<nixpkgs/nixos/modules/services/desktops/pipewire/pipewire.nix>. - Going to github:NixOS/nixpkgs/…/pipewire.nix you can see that ultimately this option is simply adding lines to
/etc/alsa/conf.d/49-pipewire-modules.conf - However, those lines depend on
${pkgs.pkgsi686Linux.pipewire}. - Therefore, the build system (nix) will need
pkgs.pipewirebuilt for i686 as a dependency when you enable this option.
i686 support was announced to be more significantly curtailed a year and a half ago, but according to comments in that thread i686 was effectively broken for much longer. You can also confirm that the last successful hydra build for nixos-26.05 does not include an i686 build of nixpkgs.pipewire.
The result of this investigation is that enabling this option is expected to force you to compile packages at this time due to infra limitation on the ability to support i686.