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?

  • kyleraykbs@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      I appreciate by the tone of your post that you’re trying to be helpful, but:

      1. 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?

      1. 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.

      1. 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.

      1. 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.

      • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        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.