this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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You don't need it often. Just if you are running pre-built binaries. There are other ways to work around it but steam-run is a big hammer that basically sets up an environment that looks like a "regular" distro with a bunch of command libraries available for running that command.
One example I had in web-dev was Prisma which wants to download some pre-built binaries when installed via npm. These are available in nixpkgs (and I am now using these) but the first way to get it working was just to run it via steam-run.
Interesting. I think I understand. Would using distrobox with Arch or Ubuntu be another way to make a environment that would work?
I don't know much about distrobox but probably. It seems like distrobox would be a bit more isolated from the host system. (Which can be both a prod or a con depending on your use case.) steam-run will also reuse the host libraries rather than downloading a new copy so it will be more efficient.