unhinge

open an issue I guess? I’m not sure

Ah, I forgot to mention that you can ask for help on https://discourse.nixos.org/ , you’ll get better reach there. It has helped me a lot since I started with nix

I lookup for the package here https://search.nixos.org/packages? I can find multiple versions.

It’d help if you mentioned the package itself.

two that sound right, two sound like rubbish and one is a plugin for something. How do I decide which of the two good sounding packages I should choose

Let’s say you wanted to install neovim, there are many similar packages available, viz. neovim, neovim-gtk, neovim-qt, etc. they all have description and most packages have link to homepage, hinting their purpose. But you can ignore *-unwrapped packages if you are not packaging yourself.

What if the package or even both not work?

This seems like packaging problem, most of the time it works. If not, notifying the maintainers via issues could help or you’ll have to fix it for yourself or use other package manager.

How do I know that it is up to date?

Go to package homepage if available and check their releases and compare them with version shown on search.nixos.org. If homepage is not available, go to source and get the url from src attribute and check the original source and compare with version shown on search.nixos.org.

How do I know that it will be updated in a timely manner? Can I update it?

You can check the commit history for the “source” file. Also you can update it yourself. If you’re lucky and know nix, then you’ll only have to update the url/version and hash like here.

is there a guideline for using nix packages?

you can checkout https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_command and may be https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.18/. Unfortunately I can’t find an comprehensive guideline for begineers. Others can chime in if they know.

Notice about experimental features nix-command and flakes.

If you see documentations other official sources, most often they’ll use flakes/nix-command but since they’re not officially stabilised (not as in broken) yet, documentation/blogs may vary. This can be quite frustrating if you don’t know about it.

Without flakes/nix-command, to install (let’s say) neovim on non-NixOS distro nix-env -iA nixos.neovim, you can see that when search on search.nixos.org and click on the required packages, then choose one of the three tabs: nix-env, nix-shell or NixOS-configuration.

nix-env installs the packages in your user environment, you can rollback and stuff.

nix-shell downloads the package and spawns a new shell (your shell prompt changes to [nix-shell]:) and you can use the package there and package won’t be installed. This is good for trying packages before installing.

For using flakes/nix-command, first you’ll have to enable them otherwise you’ll get this error

$ nix shell nixpkgs#neovim
error: experimental Nix feature 'nix-command' is disabled; use '--extra-experimental-features nix-command' to override

you can append --extra-experimental-features nix-command to the above command nix shell nixpkgs#neovim --extra-experimental-features nix-command and it’ll work temporarily.

OR

Append this line experimental-features = nix-command flakes to /etc/nix/nix.conf to enable nix-command and flakes.

nix shell nixpkgs#neovim is equivalent to nix-shell -p neovim though in the former it’s using nixpkgs-unstable branch of github.com/nixos/nixpkgs. nix profile install nixpkgs#neovim is equivalent to nix-env -iA nixos.neovim though it’s said to stop using nix-env

PS: This could be more comprehensive, my writing skills are shit lol

Secondly, the dotfiles. I hear there is the Home Manager for that, but it doesn’t have support for everything

In this case, you can use home.file option of home-manager similar to environment.etc of NixOS configuration.

For example, let’s configure dunst with home-manager ^[1]:

# installing the package
home.packages = [ pkgs.dunst ];

# configure dunst

## writing new config
home.file.".config/dunst/dunstrc" = {
    text = ''
        [urgency_critical]
            timeout = 15
    '';
};

## using existing config
home.file.".config/dunst/dunstrc".source = "/path/to/existing/dunst/config";

services.dunst = {
    enable = true;
    # using existing config
    configFile = "/path/to/existing/dunst/config";

    # new config
    settings = {
        urgency_critical = {
            timeout = 15;
        };
    };
};

Is there a way to manage everything at the same time?

Yes, create a git repo and keep your configuration there. Don’t keep secrets unencrypted in there as those will end up in world readable /nix/store. Any user where system or human can access those. You can use any scheme to manage secrets at wiki^[2].

Even better if everything is in configuration.nix

You can do everything in single file but I wouldn’t recommend it as configuration may grow quickly and be difficult to manage later. Instead you may split the configuration.nix into multiple files and import those in configuration.nix.

Flakes simply helps to manage the inputs easily (e.g. nixpkgs, home-manager), i.e., which version of input your config uses. Traditionally inputs is managed by nix-channel imperatively. It generates flake.lock to store the hash of inputs which won’t be updated unless you update it. If you copy the config between different machines (or reinstall), you’ll get exact same version of packages. It also helps avoid adding nix-channel, which you have to add manually during reinstall and you may not get the same version of packages. So, it’s not important as you can do all things with/without it.

I found this guide ^[3] quite helpful to start with flakes. You may use one of Misterio77’s starter configs^[4]. Also, a big surprise with flakes is that if you don’t use git, then your all files from config dir will end up in /nix/store (world-readable^[5]) ^{[6] [7]}. So, you should use git with flakes that way only commited files will end up in /nix/store(world-readable).