Post #3364675
2026-06-21 06:51 UTC
Replies (1)
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@Mordikan@kbin.earth 2026-06-21 07:11
I've been thinking more and more about this (the NixOS to Arch) and comments saying "that should be easy". Dynamic linking creates a catch 22 to all of this. You have to do the majority of steps live and can't reboot. NixOS doesn't follow FHS, but Arch bootstrapping requires that. If you force-create those directories and try to bootstrap Arch over a live NixOS instance, the binaries you compile will instantly break because they won't be able to find the dynamic linker (ld-linux) or standard C libraries (glibc) in the locations they expect. At some point you are going to be using Nix's development tools to build out pacman. To get around the previous issues you would drop to a nix-shell to build the environment (which is one really good use of NixOS in general), but then you'd segfault as soon as you tried to use it outside the environment. Even with the pacman binary present as soon as you rug pull glibc from memory, since pacman is needing the host's instance of that, you'd have a kernel panic.