Nix / NixOS @programming.dev AVincentInSpace @pawb.social 1 mo. ago

My new user experience has been awful and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Could really use some guidance.

I recently tried switching from Arch to NixOS and the experience I had can best be described as apalling. I have not had a new user experience this bad since my first dip into Ubuntu dependency hell back in 2016. I'd like to preface this by saying I've been a Linux user in one form or another for almost half my life at this point, and in that time this may well be the most I've struggled to get things to work.

Apparently they have this thing called home-manager which looks pretty cool. I'd like to give that a shot. Apparently I have to enable a new Nix channel before I can install it. I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a PPA? Well, alright. nix-channel --add ..., nix-channel --update (oh, so it waits until now to tell me I typo'd the URL. Alright), and now to run the installation command and... couldn't find home-manager? Huh?? I just installed it. I google the error message and apparently you have to reboot after adding a new nix-channel and doing nix-channel --update before it will actually take effect, and the home-manager guide didn't tell me that. Ah well, at least it works now.

I didn't want to wait for KDE and its 6 morbillion dependencies to download, so I opted for Weston. It wasn't a thing in configuration.nix (programs.weston.enable=true; threw an error and there was no page for it on the NixOS wiki), but it was available in nix-env (side note: why does nix-env -i take upwards of 30 seconds just to locate a package?), so I installed it, tried to run it, and promptly got an inscrutable "Permission denied" error with one Google result that had gone unresolved. Oh well, that's alright, I guess that's not supported just yet -- I'll install Sway instead. Great, now I have a GUI and all I need is a browser. nix-env -i firefox gave me the firefox-beta binary which displayed the crash reporter before even opening a browser window. Okay, note to self: always use configuration.nix. One programs.firefox.enable=true; and one nixos-rebuild switch later, I'm off to the races. Browser is up and running. Success! Now I'd like to install a Rust development environment so I can get back to work. According to NixOS wiki, I can copy paste this incantation into a shell.nix file and have rustup in there. Cool. After resolving a few minor hangups regarding compiler version, manually telling rustc where the linker is, and telling nix-shell that I also need cmake (which was thankfully pretty easy), I'm met with a "missing pkg-config file for openssl" error that I have absolutely no idea how to begin to resolve.

I'm trying to stick with it, I really am -- I love the idea that I can just copy my entire configuration to a brand new install by copying one file and the contents of my home directory and have it be effectively the same machine -- but I'm really struggling here. Surely people wouldn't rave about NixOS as much as they do if it was really this bad? What am I doing wrong?

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

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37 comments

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,

Use flakes, nix channel is legacy and is imperative meaning nix channel changes won't be copied per system

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.

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

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.

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.

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 appreciate by the tone of your post that you're trying to be helpful, but:
  
  Use flakes
  
  Why? What are they? How would I find out about them?
  
  All I've heard about flakes is that it's an experimental feature that's still evolving. Shouldn't I learn the stable system first?
  
  Try to purify everything
  
  That's what I'm trying to do. Doing everything the "nix way" but that means none of my previous knowledge is useful. It's a very steep learning curve.
  
  Fuck the wiki read the code and other peoples configs.
  
  So you're telling me I need to reverse engineer everything I want to do with no documentation. Great.
  
  Use home manager early
  
  Why? What is it ? What problem does it solve?
  
  check out vimjoyers channel for this seriously he's great.
  
  Ok, a tangible resource to go look at. Great, will do. Thanks for that, but most other things you wrote put me off more than help me.
  
  Nix's biggest issue is that it has a steep learning curve and throwing more things (flakes / home manager) into the mix just makes it feel more daunting. That's especially true when you're saying to ignore what small amount of documentation there is.
  
  I wish there were more resources I'm just tryina point you in a general right direction. I should a included more stuff though.
  
  Use Flakes You can think of flakes as declarative channels, with the added ability of using multiple channels at once and importing other flakes. I use both stable and unstable on my system and my flake has both. They also allow you to import other projects that use flakes a great example of this is base16.nix and my neovim config, try running nix run github:kyleraykbs/neovim and add the expirimental features flag it will complain at you about if you dont have flakes enabled.
  
  To clarify, I ment declaratively, cause 'the nix way' isnt pure if you use channels and such, I could a been more clear about that sorry.
  
  This is a complicated one.. You aren't reverse engineering it, its open source and in my opinion NixLang actually documents itself quite well, I haven't had a problem with the readability of nixpkgs and there's even a link to the source on search.nixos.org for any given option or package. On top of that NixOS is a rabbit hole of abstractions and at least personally I find it harder to build stuff for if I dont understand the layers of complexity that I'm standing on, reading the source is the only real way to do it as of current. But it is understandable that it might be hard to understand as a new user, and unfortunately my only suggestion is to read other peoples configs, that gave me a good idea of what to do and how to do it, still a pain of course but nix will hurt you a lot before it starts to get nice to use. Also once again vimjoyer is a wonderful resource for all of this.
  
  It makes it so all config is done in NixLang and therefore can take full advantage of nix, it also allows you to drop your home configs or parts of it on on any machine with just the config. Its just nixos but for your home, and as I said in my last comment the more nix tracks on your system the easier your life is.
  
  The learning curve just will be steep and as someone who got though its worth it.
  
  The matter of flakes is complicated. Yes they are experimental, but in reality most Nix users use them despite that. I'm a bit on the fence on whether you should start with flakes because they do add some complexity. You can copy paste a sample flake configuration from the Internet (there are many but they all do exactly the same things) and you'll probably be fine but telling people to just copy paste code they don't understand feels wrong as well.
  
  Regarding documentation... I wouldn't go as far as saying you should avoid it entirely but it is in a very unfortunate state with a lot of wiki pages being outdated or just containing snippets that do things in very weird ways, or are over engineered to the point of being incomprehensible.
  
  And that's if someone bothered to write up anything at all. It's a bit sad but reading from the nixpkgs GitHub (or other people's dotfiles) is sometimes the only way to get certain information, such as valid values for package overrides.
  
  I appreciate the response. You seems to understand why this is frustrating at least.
  
  Since writing my question about flakes I've seen a few pointers from people and read a little more. It seems like flakes solve the "problem" of the channel not being pinned to a specific version in the configuration.nix.
  
  Honestly that doesn't seem to be a problem worth worrying about whilst I'm learning, especially if it makes the documentation obsolete.
  
  I don't understand why people are so sold on it for beginners (yourself excluded).
  
  My qualifications allow me to write flake on my own, and I have even tried doing it. But after a bit of figuring it out, I set the recommended ISO, connected an unstable channel (I used 24.05 back when it wasn't mainstream), configured the whole system according to the NixOS Wiki and...used the system daily, delighted with its amazing flexibility and stability. I've described everything I don't like about the "experimental features" here
  
  I remember Dolstra writing on his blog that flakes' are needed to "ensure the best tolerance". Haha, I ensure portability of my system with a single yusb flash drive. I think Dolstra got tired of messing around with NixOS and wanted to reduce development costs by annoyingly suggesting a switch to flakes`.
- 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
  
  This is what caused my bad initial experience and has left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole thing. I'm not a fan of the syntax and DSL but, could get over that with good docs. I DO find the concept interesting but until the docs are useful, it's a non-starter for me.
- I have a few questions. If your opinion is correct and nix-channels are rotten outdated crap, why aren't they removed from use? Why hasn't any of the nix developers decided to make flakes an integral part of the system yet? I can answer these questions. Any operating system is a complete piece of software only when it follows the developers' backbone logic. At the moment when NixOS becomes a collection of flakes of varying degrees of stupidity, NixOS will cease to exist. Everyone knows and keeps silent that Dolstra started all this nonsense with flakes and home manager only to attract more defectors from other systems. There is no other reason. When a person has worked 30 years in production, he will hardly want to retrain for a new architecture and learn a rather stupid language. The home manager is a crutch written by a third-party developer and its only task is to make the /home folder look familiar to the Arch Linux user. There are no other functions. In the end, all flakes end up in configuration.nix overcomplicating and confusing the configuration. So it's much better to stop chasing other people's hyprland configs and install the recommended ISO, switch to an unstable branch and...read the Wiki.
  
  Dude what are you on about? Channels are just imperative and that kinda goes against the purpose of nix same deal with why I recommend home manager, if you're gonna do NixOS imo you should do it pure and it sounds like op wants that. The rest of your rant is absolutely unhinged.
  
  When dudes use flakes config, they usually disable channels by lock their setup to their/anyone's github. This is kind of how it works.
  
  I use flakes and I do disable channels yeah but that wasn't what the other 90% of your post was about
  
  Can you please tell me how you managed to measure the percentage of "about this" and "not about that" in my comment? In any NixOS community, there are always a bunch of people ready to cut the throat of anyone who says "flakes is dogshit". These are the same people who are always crying "I downloaded flake from some crappy github and now my beloved hyprland doesn't want to work". Is this a coincidence?
  
  Never seen anyone do that?? But dude if everyone is telling you that your doing it wrong, you might be doing it wrong.
  
  Your problem is that you are drawing the wrong logical conclusions. The crowd can be wrong.Especially if the crowd relies on collective intelligence.

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