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.

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’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.

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.