I have put some effort in using NVidia proprietary drivers lately, which was especially painful because my WM is Sway (yes, the WM that, up to not so far ago had a --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia option to enable a (buggy) compatibility with proprietary drivers…). However, apparently NVidia drivers have become open source, so their support has increased and, in the end, I was able to successfully make it work (although there is still some flickering, once in a while).
While doing all this, I stumbled upon a project called nixpkgs-wayland, which describes itself as “Automated, pre-built packages for Wayland (sway/wlroots) tools for NixOS (nixos-unstable channel)”, so I said myself: “ah, cool, I work with Wayland, I use sway on NixOS with nixpkgs-unstable. I don’t know what that is, but if there is one kind of user who must find this useful, it’s me.” Ok, so at that pointed I looked at the installation section, under the Flakes subsection, and followed the instructions, and now I’m stuck in this situation where I still don’t know what was the purpose of this whole project to begin with. I mean, they say they have prebuilt packages for Wayland, and in the list of the packages they provide, I found a lot I use myself (such as sway, swaylock, swayidle, swaybar, imv, dunst, i3status-rs, …) but I never had to compile these (in the sense that they were always available directly from NixOS’ binary cache).
So, well, I have the impression that everything that is packaged in nixpkgs-wayland is already packaged in nixpkgs, and similarly for the binary cache, so why does it exist? What is its purpose?
Subsidiary question: why is not nixpkgs-wayland “merged” with nixpkgs? If it’s true they package stuff to be compatible with wayland, I would have expected to have a single package in nixpkgs having an option like waylandSupport or something like that that one could override.