Hello Linux community.
I’d like to take a moment to explain what I hope will be a simple concept (so really it’s more of a reminder) that everyone should say least know and understand.
Not everyone (myself included) learns best by RTFM. Some of us need a guiding hand or to watch a video instead. It’s not that we’re lazy or don’t like reading, it’s just that it doesn’t work efficiently enough.
What are you talking about?, NixOS documentation is one of the best ones around, not to mention that with just being pointed to the approximate direction of something and having a good text editor you can figure out things quite easily and without risk of breaking your system. I’ve recently switched from Arch and honestly as good as documentation is on Arch, I prefer NixOS one.
Sure if it’s in the Wiki the documentation is not too bad. But just looking for the documention of the lib functions via DuckDuckGo is somehow really hard. And if it’s not in the Wiki or you want the home-manager module, I’ll basically default to first looking at the options on 3rd party websites and then reading the source code for them. (Also the NixOS wiki is obviously not as comprehensive / big as the Arch Wiki)
Are you not aware of https://search.nixos.org/options or https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.xhtml ? You can search all available options, sometimes with links to the docs for the thing they set for extra context. Those are both official docs and are derived from the code that you’re already looking at.
I am talking from experience here. Some of the documentation is out of date, some is meant for Channel NixOS installs and not so appropriate for Flake-based installs.
Most of the fixes for my issues I find across NixOS discourse forum posts, or in the subreddit of the other platform. The Wiki/official documentation is not enough.
I’m glad you switched to NixOS (welcome!) but this is gap in documentation is something that will become more apparent over time. The NixOS official wiki ironically often links to Arch wiki to explain certain concepts further.
What am I missing? There should be no difference from “normal” to flake installs on anything NixOS related, only in syntax of the language itself since you’re wrapping things. I’ve gone flakes and now somewhat dendritic and haven’t had to check NixOS docs for anything (only nix language docs and other people’s configs to see how they solved certain language specific peculiarities)
Uh… is the NixOS documentation “one of the best around” or have you never checked it? It really can’t be both.
Understand, I’m not trying to criticize NixOS. I use NixOS exclusively and it’s my daily driver. But the documentation really isn’t all there, and it’s not centralized. The best solutions you find across forums, blog posts, random wikis, and by checking other people’s configs like you said.
But yes, the fact you can test things without fear of breaking your system allows you to make hundreds of mistakes stress-free. That’s one of the best features about NixOS.
I’ve checked the NixOS documentation extensively for setting things up, my point was that I hadn’t had to do so for migrating to flakes, as that’s not a NixOS thing, but rather a Nix language thing.