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I wonder whether a “chrooted distro” would solve that elegantly; essentially, having a debian install where you can put the things it packages well.



I run Debian's Chromium package on a 32bit NixOS machine, since cache.nixos.org stopped providing non-essential builds for 32bit a few years ago and I building Chromium from source myself was too slow.

My solution was to fetch a Debian filesystem, chroot into it (using proot) and run 'apt-get install chromium'. The result is an immutable Debian with Chromium installed. My chromium executable is then a script which chroots into that filesystem (again using proot) and runs chromium.

It's not reproducible, but it's simpler than maintaining a list of all the required .deb files and their SHA256.


You sort of have that with NixOS as well, with eg. steam-run that provides a debian-like chroot and can run most executables. (You can also modify it to include any dependency you like, that will get installed to standard locations)


I have used debootstrap on Arch to install and run Xilinx's Vivado inside an Ubuntu chroot and it worked fine without any configuration.




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