How to Wrap NixGL Around Package in Home Manager

I use Nix mainly with home manager on my Ubuntu laptop, and for the most part, it works fine. However, some apps installed using Nix, need to use nixGL. A wrapper tool for OpenGL, allowing Nix installed tooling to use the system’s OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. Some apps including kitty and Firefox (mainly for Google Meet).

There is currently a branch in home-manager we can pull into our config, which provides a convenient way to wrap these apps in nixGL rather than needing to specify say nixGLIntel kitty in our terminal or say Hyprland config (key bindings).

First, let’s import the relevant code from the branch/PR:

 imports = [
    # TODO: remove when https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/pull/5355 gets merged:
    (builtins.fetchurl {
      url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Smona/home-manager/nixgl-compat/modules/misc/nixgl.nix";
      sha256 = "01dkfr9wq3ib5hlyq9zq662mp0jl42fw3f6gd2qgdf8l8ia78j7i";
    })
  ];

Then, simply, we can do something like this:

programs = {
    kitty.package = config.lib.nixGL.wrap pkgs.kitty;
    firefox.package = config.lib.nixGL.wrap pkgs.firefox;
}

Then we should be able to use the apps like normal, such as using our app launcher like rofi. That’s It!

Appendix

Commit with nixGL wrap in my own config

Appendix¶

Appendix