I'm trying to package Elmer for use with NixOS, and could use some help from any experienced Nix users. My current attempt is located here. There is some junk left around in that file from my experimenting, but it's at least a start. There are also a few lines of error included in the comment here.

Any help is appreciated!

I don't wanna get into a heated discussion, so let me make something very clear: for a regular user, video editing on Linux is probably fine.

That is just not my use case.

I'm used to a degree of freedom, choice, and stability that, right now, Linux does not provide in that area.

I'm a film major who has worked as a professional video editor for many years and editing video on anything that is not nearly as good, reliable and precise as Adobe Premiere feels like torture.

But even being very flexible regarding features and requirements, after trying all the regular suggestions, as professional tools, and with all the respect I can muster, they are just unusable for me.

I need a reliable program in which I can throw any format without worrying about constant crashes, but Linux options are all either extremely limited, unstable or both! Before anyone asks: I tried multiple programs, in different versions and installation methods, on entirely different hardware and unaffiliated distributions.

Kdenlive resembles professional-grade software but constantly crashes at the simplest operations. DaVinci Resolve seems like a good bet but is a nightmare just to install and equally crashy when/if I'm able to do so (last time I had to manually edit the install script following the instructions of some random forum post. This did not cause a good impression. And audio didn't work), and I'm not willing to use something so finicky if Linux doesn't get primary support.

Besides, Blackmagic Design only provides a few pieces of the puzzle. Professional video editing requires a whole stack of integrated software. Both Windows and Mac OS have this, Linux has not.

There's also the issue of GPU acceleration.

I'm not saying FOSS developers owe me anything, nor that they have done a bad job with programs like OpenShot, Pitivi, Blender, whatever. I'm just saying that, regrettably, I'll probably have to install put Windows on dual-boot on my machine in the next few days.

I had a bit of free time tonight and decided to write a short blog post detailing my solution for installing Firefox Nightly on NixOS, since this was the only solution I came across that actually worked and was not ridiculously complicated.

• How to install Firefox Nightly on NixOS

I wrote this in about an hour and I was (and am) quite tired, so please forgive (but still point out) any mistakes or possible improvements. Hopefully my solution ends up being useful for you.

Finally, to spare everyone from having to look at my "blog", here is the text of the post copied onto Tildes:

Like some other Linux distributions, NixOS supports the use of overlays.

I am actually not very familiar with how overlays work on NixOS. So, for the sake of simplicity, we will just think of them as being similar to PPAs on Ubuntu. Except, instead of being a custom repository of downloadable packages, NixOS overlays are more like scripts that instruct the package manager on how to download and build additional packages (or just about anything, really).

You might be wondering why you cannot just download the official Firefox Nightly release straight from Mozilla, extract it, and use that.

Indeed, that is how I have always installed Firefox Nightly on other Linux distributions (it even automatically updates itself!), but I was unable to get it working on NixOS, hence the overlay. (You might have better luck though.)

Thankfully for us, the overlay we are going to use is actually maintained by Mozilla:

• nixpkgs-mozilla

Located in this repository is a firefox-overlay.nix file, which is what we will use to fetch our Firefox Nightly binary. Go ahead and clone this repository onto your computer.

Once you have cloned the repository, you will need to make a couple of edits to your configuration.nix file in /etc/nixos/.

First, you will need to add the line nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true; if you want to use the binary Firefox packages and avoid having to compile them yourself (which I do not recommend doing, unless you have beefy hardware and a lot of free time).

(The binary packages are considered "unfree" because of the Firefox trademark.)

Second, you will need to add another line to your configuration.nix file that declares the firefox-overlay.nix file, from the repository you cloned, as an overlay. That can be accomplished with this line:

nixpkgs.overlays = [ (import /path/to/firefox-overlay.nix) ];

Finally, assuming you have done everything correctly, the last thing you will need to do is add a line declaring a Firefox package to install. Since this blog post is about installing Firefox Nightly, we'll add this line to our systemPackages list, alongside the rest of our system packages:

latest.firefox-nightly-bin

In the end, your configuration.nix file should end up with three new lines:

  nixpkgs.overlays = [ (import /etc/nixos/firefox-overlay.nix) ];
  nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
	  latest.firefox-nightly-bin
  ];

(I symlink my firefox-overlay.nix file to /etc/nixos/, but you can put it just about wherever you want. )

And that should be it! Just run a nixos-rebuild command to bring your system in-sync with your configuration.nix file and Firefox Nightly should then be installed and usable.

Shout out to the anonymous, deleted GitHub user who posted a comment on one of the overlay repository's issues. This was a very simple, very elegant solution. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to find this solution and I ran into quite a few people who were doing the same thing, but with vastly more complex configurations.