"QtGraphicalEffects" is not installed

[b3e3e3]

When following the nix install instructions on a fresh install of Omarchy (Arch based) I receive the following error:

QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/pwar_gui.qml:5:1: module "QtGraphicalEffects" is not installed

I have tried installing qt5-qtgraphicaleffects as that is the closest thing I found in my package manager, but no luck.

I am not super familiar with QT and am not sure how to diagnose this issue, so I thought I'd report it.

[umbertov]

I have tried installing qt5-qtgraphicaleffects as that is the closest thing I found in my package manager, but no luck.

idk how familiar you are with nix, but if you're using it, then it does not matter which libraries you install on your system: binaries built with nix will only link against shared libraries in the /nix/store directory.

I'm on arch and the nix setup did not work out of the box on my machine either. I ended up building normally with cmake, had to install qt5-qtgraphicaleffects and also qt5-quickcontrols2.

I guess your PR should fix the issue with the nix build on non-NixOS systems too.

[b3e3e3]

Gotcha, that makes a lot of sense-- I think I am misunderstanding how the build environment functions. I am having some issues on Arch, maybe it's something to do with my specific setup.

[umbertov]

In my experience, using nix to build GUI apps on non-NixOS linux systems is always kinda wonky.

That's because if the flake author is on NixOS and they forget to specify a runtime dependency, there's a chance that they won't notice on their system, because they already have that in their nix store. But when the program runs on another, non-NixOS system, that missing dependency will be resolved by the dynamic linker to a library on the host system, or result in a "no such file or directory libsomething.so" error.

To add to that, some libraries can still use some "impure" mechanisms (configuration files in your home dir, environment variables, unix sockets, other IPC, ...) to communicate with parts of your host system, even if you build everything inside nix.

I usually get around this by working out how to build GUI binaries myself outside of nix, which also spares me from downloading the nix version of many GUI libraries.

When all the problems in the nix flake are fixed though, the flake is going to be robust and work on a variety of host systems.