If you would like to contact me, the best places would be on one of the following:

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Note that if I don’t recognize your Discord account, I will likely ignore your friend request. Instead, consider messaging me on Matrix with an informative initial message.

I use the following services with varying levels of activity. Feel free to message me on any of them, though I may not respond on the less often used ones. Once again, I might not respond to friend requests from users I don’t recognize.

Listed in no particular order:

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• GitLab: huantian

Just wanted to write a blog post about a bug I found in Dolphin quite a while ago, which I’ve reported here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448188.

A common action that applications might want to do is to open up a folder in whatever file manager you happen to use. This can be used to show you where, say, a file you just downloaded is, or where exactly the file you’re editing in your text editor is. Often times, for these tasks, it’s benificial to actually open up that folder and select exactly the file you want the user to pay attention to. That’s exactly what the ShowItems method in the org.freedesktop.FileManager1 DBus interface is for!

If you’re unaware, DBus is a fancy way for applications on Linux to communicate with one another. In this case, file managers can implement this interface so applications know how to perform this action, and have it work across distros and desktop environements. You can find more info on this specific interface and method here: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface/.

As an aside, why don’t desktop portals have a way of doing this? We can tell the file manager to open up to a specific place, yes, but not a specific folder. It seems that for Dolphin though, it suffers the same bug I’ll describe below when you show a folder through portals too. Perhaps this bug is already reported under there, I’ll have to look.

The actual bug happens when you try and show a folder when Dolphin is already open, and it needs to open up a new tab to show you this location you tell it to. If the file you’re trying to show isn’t in a folder that’s already open, instead of opening up that folder in the existing Dolphin window, it will instead create a new Dolphin window, sometimes with an old Dolphin state, and show you the file there!

As you can expect, this is quite annoying. It’s also been quite a long standing bug for me, and I’m not sure if it’s due to a configuration error on my end at this point. I’ll be looking for more bug reports of this issue, but for now, I’ll simply cope with this bug and maybe try and fix it some day myself.

Because we’re using this wonderfully esoteric Linux distribution, the recommended installation methods for both Unity Hub and JetBrains Rider will not work. Thankfully, both the packages we’ll need are packaged in Nixpkgs and ready for you to use!

Well, mostly. We’ll want to do a bit of configuring to make sure that everything is working properly.

Unity Hub

Unity Hub is the program that Unity3D recommends you use for installing different versions of Unity3D on your systems. The latest version is available in Nixpkgs as unityhub and can be installed by adding it to your environment.systemPackages like any other program:

1{
2  environment.systemPackages = [
3    pkgs.unityhub
4  ];
5}

Once you have it installed, you can simply launch it, log in, and use it as you would on any other Linux distribution!

This derivation can also be overridden if you need any other system libraries or packages available for your Unity game. For example, I have this in my system configuration for development on Rhythm Doctor:

 1{
 2  environment.systemPackages = [
 3    (pkgs.unityhub.override {
 4      extraPkgs = fhsPkgs: [
 5        fhsPkgs.harfbuzz
 6        fhsPkgs.libogg
 7      ];
 8    })
 9  ];
10}

OpenSSL Woes

Unity Editor versions before 2022 depend on an older version of OpenSSL that is now marked as insecure. Running any of those versions without any tweaks will give the annoying error message No usable version of libssl was found and prevent you from running your game.

The ideal workaround would be to update your Unity editor to a version that works with OpenSSL 3, but if that’s not a solution, for now you can manually add the insecure version of OpenSSL to your Unity Hub:

1{
2  environment.systemPackages = [
3    (pkgs.unityhub.override {
4      extraLibs = fhsPkgs; [
5        fhsPkgs.openssl_1_1
6      ];
7    })
8  ];
9}

See this GitHub issue for more information.

Login page not opening?

Unity Hub is packaged in a FHS environment, which causes a bug where xdg-open simply does not work. This program is often used to open pages in the users browser, such as what Unity Hub does in order to allow you to sign in. To work around this, we can use the xdgOpenUsePortal option to enable an alternate implementation that works:

1{
2  xdg.portal = {
3    enable = true;
4    xdgOpenUsePortal = true;
5  };
6}

See this issue and this broader issue for more info.

JetBrains Rider

JetBrains recommends using JetBrains Toolbox in order to install Rider, and Toolbox is available in Nixpkgs. I personally have not used this much, but it should work if you prefer the traditional method of installing JetBrains products.

Alternatively, you can use the version of Rider directly provided by Nixpkgs at jetbrains.rider. This will require some tweaking to get it to work perfectly with the Unity Editor integration though.

The first step is to add some extra tools and libraries to Rider’s PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and the second is to modify Rider’s file structure to match what the Unity plugin expects:

 1let
 2  extra-path = with pkgs; [
 3    dotnetCorePackages.sdk_6_0
 4    dotnetPackages.Nuget
 5    mono
 6    msbuild
 7    # Add any extra binaries you want accessible to Rider here
 8  ];
 9
10  extra-lib = with pkgs;[
11    # Add any extra libraries you want accessible to Rider here
12  ];
13
14  rider = pkgs.jetbrains.rider.overrideAttrs (attrs: {
15    postInstall = ''
16      # Wrap rider with extra tools and libraries
17      mv $out/bin/rider $out/bin/.rider-toolless
18      makeWrapper $out/bin/.rider-toolless $out/bin/rider \
19        --argv0 rider \
20        --prefix PATH : "${lib.makeBinPath extra-path}" \
21        --prefix LD_LIBRARY_PATH : "${lib.makeLibraryPath extra-lib}"
22
23      # Making Unity Rider plugin work!
24      # The plugin expects the binary to be at /rider/bin/rider,
25      # with bundled files at /rider/
26      # It does this by going up two directories from the binary path
27      # Our rider binary is at $out/bin/rider, so we need to link $out/rider/ to $out/
28      shopt -s extglob
29      ln -s $out/rider/!(bin) $out/
30      shopt -u extglob
31    '' + attrs.postInstall or "";
32  });
33in
34{
35  environment.systemPackages = [
36    rider
37  ];
38}

In addition, you’ll need to create a dummy .desktop file in .local/share to allow the extension to find the application. (This is because this is where JetBrains Toolbox would create a .desktop file for the application). You can do this via home-manager if you’d wish:

 1# Unity Rider plugin looks here for a .desktop file,
 2# which it uses to find the path to the rider binary.
 3{
 4  environment.systemPackages = [
 5    rider
 6  ];
 7
 8  home-manager.users.huantian.home.file = {
 9    ".local/share/applications/jetbrains-rider.desktop".source =
10      let
11        desktopFile = pkgs.makeDesktopItem {
12          name = "jetbrains-rider";
13          desktopName = "Rider";
14          exec = "\"${rider}/bin/rider\"";
15          icon = "rider";
16          type = "Application";
17          # Don't show desktop icon in search or run launcher
18          extraConfig.NoDisplay = "true";
19        };
20      in
21      "${desktopFile}/share/applications/jetbrains-rider.desktop";
22  };
23}

Wrap-up

That’s all you should need to get started for making games on NixOS! As always, if there are any issues or improvements that you notice could be made, feel free to let me know.

I’ll also link to the relevant Unity Hub and Rider configs in my personal NixOS config for reference.