I’ve only tinkered with Nix in a VM so I’m no expert, but I will say this: for every person that raves about it, it seems there’s someone else who decided that the hassle of learning an entirely new way to do pretty much everything on a Linux system, often with sparse documentation, wasn’t worth the time investment.

Your experience sounds pretty much par for the course, to me. People who think Arch is hard have obviously never tried Nix.

I’m not sure why nix-env is so slow exactly but it’s the wrong tool to use anyways as it just throws away everything NixOS has going for itself in favour of pretending to be a normal package manager. You really just want to use the configuration file.

The “normal” way to install packages in NixOS would be using environment.systemPackages. The various programs.<name> options are intended for packages requiring additional setup, like shells or desktop environments (e.g. iirc for sway it creates a systemd target and adds the .desktop files for login managers to see it). Weston has a package but not an option, so you’d have to figure that additional stuff out yourself (but running Weston from a tty should just work).

There are additional ways to install packages for single users or using home-manager but you don’t need those.

This does kinda demonstrate why (I personally think) NixOS is so hard to learn: There’s a million different ways to do anything and each has it’s own weird gotchas. And critically most of them, even when they are honestly just legacy cruft, are not actually deprecated and may even have users advocating their use, or even if they don’t nobody bothered to remove that part from the wiki (if it was ever there to begin with).

You can also see this in the flake/channel split: One person in this very thread is telling you to use flakes, while another is telling you to stick with the default (channels).

And in some (fortunately relatively rare) cases even things that everyone agrees are bad ideas still get promoted in official documentation or other prominent places, like using nix-env -i under any circumstances, ever.

And it is definitely a learning problem you are having. You are facing the same problems as a new Linux user who just installed Manjaro with KDE 6 on Wayland and is wondering why apt-get and xrandr are not working even though those are accepted answers on Stackoverflow posts from 2012. Of course as experienced Linux users we know why, but a new one has to learn a lot of stuff before “getting it” and will probably stumble onto poor advice more than once in their journey. (And learning Nix is arguably worse than learning Linux for the first time, but that depends a bit on your exact experience and background.)

If you stick to learning NixOS there will be a point when these things seem trivial, but it will be a lot of effort to get there. Is that effort worth it? Well, if the term “declarative package management” doesn’t mean anything to you, maybe not. You do sacrifice a lot of things “just” to declare your entire system state in one configuration file (or more likely, directory). But I do think the things Nix does are really cool, if you can get over the, uh, everything.

Hey friend,

My recommendation is to keep things dead simple as you start out—no fancy channels or flake inputs and such, at least not where not necessary. I’ve found a lot of success in going slow, and not feeling rushed to do everything the NixOS way at first (for example, I still manage my dotfiles with GNU stow instead of home-manager). I started off with a very simple flake and basically just using my configuration.nix to declare packages, gradually learning more from there. The Nix ecosystem is as extremely powerful as it is poorly documented—it unfortunately sometimes takes a while to (as you’ve noted) even just find information.

I’ve linked below two sites I found unbelievably helpful in my journey—the first one helps you get up and running with a very simple flake (and, yes, you will want to use a flake, even if it isn’t obvious right now why), and the second one is a huge search engine of all NixOS options, the first place I check when I’m putting something new on my system.

Good luck!

https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

https://mynixos.com/

I basically went straight to using flakes when I switched from Arch to NixOS, so I can’t speak to channels.

I use home-manager as a NixOS module. It’s a bit clunky, but it works well.

I was told when I started to basically never use nix-env, so I don’t.

For development environments (I do both rust and python), I use https://github.com/the-nix-way/dev-templates

My config is here if you want something to work from https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config

I’ve been using NixOS for almost a year. The learning curve is aggressive and the learning resources are not exactly friendly to beginners. I’d even say the tooling is poorly designed or at least seemingly redundant at times. You sorta have to grind through it. It was painful for me too, but I feel like I mostly get what I’m doing now.

If you’re interested in diving deep, I suggest trying to write a Nix derivation for some software you use that isn’t already available on NixPkgs. That was a good learning experience for me.

+1 to the people saying to start off using flakes for everything.

I’m struggling too. You allude to it, but I think my main problem is that often the only information you can find about configuring a particular package is a tangentially related discourse thread, or a tiny outdated paragraph on the wiki.

Applications are generally fine. You add them to the list of packages and then you start using them. The problem is services where there’s lots of unique configuration to be done, or programs that have a plug-in architecture. Take something like Home Assistant or Kodi and there’s quite complex nixpkgs code for them. However there’s no documentation the explain what the user is meant to do. Kodi, for example, has a set of kodiPackages plug-in packages. The wiki page gives two methods without information on why to choose one or the other, and just a configuration.nix snippet for each. So far, I’ve managed to get the plug-in files on the disk, but not to get Kodi to use them. To get his far, I’ve needed to read nixpkgs more than documentation.

I switched from arch to nixos a few months ago. I would recommended going straight to using flakes and never touching channels. Channels really confused me when I started.

Also don’t ever use env to install packages. Just add them to your configuration file and run rebuild.

This video help me a lot when starting. Its a bit old but I don’t remember anything being wrong. He goes over how to use channels and how to setup to update using flakes. Also covers homemanager setup. Nixos setup guide

Also Vimjoyer has some great nixos videos.

Hello! Made a Lemmy account to comment on this, I’ve been a long time lurker. As someone who also went into Nix blind, its always gonna be a hard time a first, its a super different paradigm then anything else out there. Few recommendations,

1. Use flakes, nix channel is legacy and is imperative meaning nix channel changes won’t be copied per system
2. Try to purify everything, you may not succeed but if you try to nixify everything then you’ll get a much better understanding of the underlying systems of nix and of course your is.
3. Fuck the wiki read the code and other peoples configs. The wiki and the docs have largely been misleading and the nixpkgs code is usually super easy to read, the source is also linked to on search.nixos.org
4. Use home manager early. Working with NixOS gets better at a rate exponential to the amount NixOS has control over and your home environment is a huge part of that.
5. Learn modules, all of nixpkgs is made of modules and your system should be as well, if you throw everything into one file you’ll have a really hard time generalizing later on, check out vimjoyers channel for this seriously he’s great.
6. Understand that Nix, NixOS and NixLang all are huge upfront investments of time for a time save later on, its absolutely worth it in my opinion but you need to be aware its gonna be very difficult and you should focus on putting your energy towards the parts most important to you. If you have multiple systems you want nix to seamlessly deploy on focus on system relationships like roles, users, flake parts, etc.

And full disclosure once you get over the learning curve it gets easier to write and understand nix, but you realize you did everything poorly and you’ll restart.

I love nix. I started on flakes and have no clue what configuration.nix, channels, or nix-env even are.

Its pretty much a toolchain to orchestrate a bunch of community bash scripts with some (optional) syntax sugar to do most things right in nix.

Scripts break. So did my own when I left the sandbox of any other distros curated version set. Now its version controlled and I can rollback.

Functional programming skills are helpful. The documentation is shit. Like really really bad. I had to go through a few lib/ src to figure out modules. It just wasn’t clicking until I did with the abstractions until I looked at the code.

I mostly search GitHub now a days for solutions with lang:nix and some tokens I know I’ll need and analyze what someone else did.

I look at the source for package defs often.

The repl can be handy.

Sorry about your troubles. Keep at it, I promise its greener on the other side.

One tip: nix-env installs things ad hoc. Its against fhe whole philosphy of nix, where your system state is defined in files. So don’t ever use that. If you need any generic package, you can add it to environment.systemPackages. If you accidentally installed something that way, its okay. Just know you might get an error if you try installing it both from nixos-rebuild and nix-env. If that happens, just uninstall from nix-env.

I have definitely found it challenging at times to do even simple things. I think it does get easier over time.

I really hope the new user experience will improve. Once the issues with flakes are fixed and they are no longer experimental I would expect flakes to replace the other ways of doing things. This will hopefully make the documentation more concise/focused/better. It might also mean more people start using nix/flakes which will surface more of these problems to be fixed.

I think people need to decide if the benefits they are getting are worth the challenges. I personally really like the reproducibility and the massive amount of packages available from one place. On other distros I have used things have ended up breaking eventually and I have had to re-install things and search for fixes. But on NixOs things keep working.

You’re doing fine. Slow down. Forget “installation”; it’s not a concept Nix uses. If jumping directly to NixOS is overwhelming, it might be easier to go back to Arch, Ubuntu, or something else you know and are comfortable with, and use Nix from a familiar distro; build up idioms for working with your preferred tools, development environments, and configuration. When you’re ready, you can try NixOS again, and hopefully it will make more sense.

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I have no knowledge of NixOS, but:

missing pkg-config file for openssl

That’s relatively common error with Rust dev, unfortunately. You need the pkg-config library installed on your system. On most distros, you install the pkg-config package via the OS package manager and then it works.

Also unrelated but am I correct in assuming that I cannot install KDE without also installing the X server?

Doesn’t work on openSUSE either. I believe, SDDM (the login manager) still makes use of X11.