I tried to launch through the sandbox but i kept running into errors, here a summary of what claude tried

1. nix develop --command is broken by the shellHook

The userShell block in shell.nix unconditionally spawns a user shell and then calls exit, which kills the session before --command gets a chance to run. This also breaks nix develop entirely when the spawned shell exits immediately (e.g. non-interactive contexts).

The fix is to only spawn the user shell in interactive mode:

if [[ $- == *i* ]]; then
  # ... detect and spawn user shell
fi

2. Nix-patched Electron doesn't work on non-NixOS distros

The Electron binary from nixpkgs is patched with NixOS-specific RPATH — it looks for GPU drivers at /run/opengl-driver/ which doesn't exist on other distros. This causes:

MESA-LOADER: failed to open dri: /run/opengl-driver/lib/gbm/dri_gbm.so
Initialization of all EGL display types failed.
Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization

I tried:

• ELECTRON_EXTRA_LAUNCH_ARGS="--disable-gpu" — Electron launches but window never appears
• LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 — same result
• --ozone-platform=wayland — same result
• app.disableHardwareAcceleration() in main.ts — still fails with libdrm.so.2: cannot open shared object file
• Symlinking host GPU libs (libEGL, libGL, libGLX, libGLESv2, libgbm, libvulkan, libdrm, etc.) into a temp dir and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH + LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH — partially works but keeps hitting missing libraries

The core issue is that nix's Electron is built against NixOS's library layout and can't resolve the host system's GPU stack. This would need something like nixGL to properly wrap the Electron binary on non-NixOS systems.

The dev shell currently only works on NixOS. Would be good to either document this limitation or integrate nixGL for non-NixOS support.

Going to merge it for now because i want to make some big refactors

This would need something like nixGL to properly wrap the Electron binary on non-NixOS systems.

Ahhh GPU drivers are definitely a headache on NIx, will try to see if I can spin up a different distro on a spare laptop to see the graphics compat situation.

The dev shell currently only works on NixOS

The fix is to only spawn the user shell in interactive mode

Slight oversight, I never use --comand myself, but #33 should address this