Plugins for Fiji/ImageJ2 biology imaging package

Help
1

Preface: I am a newcomer and a Linux enthusiast without much programming experience. I am a biologist.

The question is how to enable NixOS to allow a package of interest to install plugins that would otherwise be installed by the application’s “updater.”

I reviewed posts asking about something similar to my case (e.g., vim plugins), but I cannot see the connection to my particular package: fiji an image analysis program written in java.

Expected Outcome:
The application’s built-in updater will search a remote central database and download and install updated plugins.

Actual:
When I add pkgs.fiji to my configuration.nix file, the program launches and runs well, but using the built-in updater in NixOS returns a message “no read access”.

I want to learn Nix, so I’d be most grateful if someone had suggestions that could point me in the right direction.

2

I found a workaround thanks to this page. Download the Fiji app for Linux with JRE. Unzip and cd to the directory that contains ImageJ-linux64 and then runs $ steam-run ./ImageJ-linux64. The plugin updater works, and it is like running on a non-Nix system. Didn’t have luck with distrobox or setting up FHS as described on the linked page. But stem-run worked.

3

Steam-run is a workaround for now. I want the ability to update Fiji/ImageJ2 plugins or declaratively install updated plugins in the same way one might add R packages to R or R Studio in the proper Nix way. I don’t see any active maintainers for Fiji. Has anyone out there worked on this? Is there an analogous “fijiWrapper”?

Out of curiosity, in general, how can Steam update itself when there are game updates?