I wanted to build a native app using Rust and React so choose to use Tauri with React. I created a new project using shell command they provided and then I saw an error after the new project creation was done. webkit2gtk package was missing from my system. I use Arch Linux so searched main repo they have this package available. I tried installing it using pacman but got error

:: installing icu (73.2-1) breaks dependency 'libicuuc.so=72-64' required by brltty

I am already using a rolling release system with an experimental window manager (hyprland) with some other things and didn't want to break my system. I worked with Nix for a very small period but enjoyed using it. So, thought giving it a try would be great.

I also experimented with Nix flakes so started searching for flake file for tauri. Tauri's documentation generously provides flake config file with some others also that I would like to try like GUIX but for now I wanted to learn Tauri so copy-pasted it in flake.nix and ran nix develop I got a new environment with all libraries available. I just ran cargo run and it worked.

I will explore more about nix flakes and how its different from others like docker (podman), distrobox and GUIX is it any more helpful to use it.