Comment by Havoc
7 days ago
I found getting started quite easy.
But then you discover there are like 4-5 different ways to manage packages and not much consensus in the community on what the correct way is. That was kinda discouraging
7 days ago
I found getting started quite easy.
But then you discover there are like 4-5 different ways to manage packages and not much consensus in the community on what the correct way is. That was kinda discouraging
A fairly clear hierarchy emerges with enough experience, I think, but I don't know if there's explicit consensus about it of the kind that could make its way into documentation. Here are the rules of thumb, though (in a kind of priority order):
0. If you're new and on the fence about using flakes, go ahead. (If you know you don't want them, fine.)
1. Prefer declarative installation to imperative installation.
2. If a module exists, prefer using it to configure a package to just adding that package to a list of installed packages.
3. 'Native' packages are better than 'alien' packages.
3a. Packaged for Nix is better than managed externally. (I.e., prefer that programs live in the Nix store rather than Flatpak or Homebrew.)
3b. Prefer packages built from source to packages carved out of foreign binaries.
4. Prefer to just rely on Nixpkgs for things that are already in Nixpkgs; only bother with other sources of Nix code (likely distributed as 'flakes') if you know you need them.
5. Prefer smaller installation scopes to larger installation scopes— when installing a package, go with the first of these that will work: per-session (i.e., ephemeral dev env) -> per-user -> system-wide).
6. Prefer Nixlang to not-Nixlang (YAML, JSON, TOML, whatever).
7. If you're not sure, go for it.
If you follow these guidelines you'll make reasonable choices and likely have a decent time. The most important rule is #1, so once you know your OS, your task is to make sure you have at least one module system available to you. (On NixOS, that's NixOS and optionally Home Manager. On other Linux, that's Home Manager. On macOS, that's Home Manager and/or Nix-Darwin.)
After that, everything can find its natural place according to the constraints above. If you need to break or relax a rule, it'll be obvious.
Inevitably you'll end up with things installed in a handful of ways and places, but you'll know why each thing belongs where it is, and you can leave yourself a note with a '#' character anywhere that you think a reminder might be useful. :)
I think there probably actually isn't one "correct" way.
Anything that is best configured with a nixos module should probably be in your system configuration, but beyond that there are probably a lot more than 5 different ways and they have their advantages and disadvantages.
What I settled on was a per-user declarative setup (first with "nix-env -r", now with "nix profile"). Then I use nix shells to run software for one-offs. If I find I am running the same software from a nix shell a lot, I toss it in my declarative file.
Plenty of people hate this setup, and do something completely different (e.g. imperative managing of profiles, or using home-manager, or a dozen direnv setups). I don't necessarily think any of them are wrong, but they are not for me for various reasons.