Nix is (still) unusable

by Agam Brahma 1 min read
Computing Tools unix

I first tried out Nix in 2018.

The second round -- I went through "Nix Pills", which helped get a better idea of what was going on -- was in 2020.

I heard NixOS getting some popularity (you know when the "Arch folks" are talking about it ...), and thought I'd try -- not the OS, not yet -- the Nix-package-on-a-VPS experience again.

I had, I'll admit, forgotten some of my intuitive grasp from three years ago.

Context

All I wanted to do was to install Emacs.

It turned out to be much harder than I expected.

Here are some things that partially or didn't work:

Searching and installing

What didn't work:

nix search emacs

What did work:

nix search nixpkgs emacs

However, this shows a result like legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29

Note: it's not obvious whether that legacyPackages prefix is a good thing, a bad thing, a neutral thing ...

What doesn't work:

  • nix install legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29
  • nix install emacs29
  • nix install nixpkgs emacs29

Using nix-env

AFAICT I should've been able to use the "new" nix CLI, and not had to fall back to nix-env ... but nope.

Something that becomes very obvious when you try to use nix-env .... it takes forever.

If you're used to apt cache ... returning quickly, this is 10x or even 100x slower.

What didn't work:

  • nix-env --install legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29
  • nix-env --install emacs29
  • nix-env --install nixpkgs.emacs29

Note: that last one is very similar to what finally worked !

Using flakes

This kept popping up, but I didn't try it. I don't know if it would've been faster with it or not. But surely, I can't be expected to create a whole file describing what I want to install instead of running a one-line install command?! Especially after I've searched for it and verified that it exists?! (i.e. the nix search ... above)

Here is what finally worked:

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.emacs29

Between searching, forum posts, and Bard, there was no way I'd have "normally" arrived at this.

Closing notes

To be clear, this won't stop me using Nix -- but I expect it's enough of friction that I think blocks wider adoption.

At a minimum, allowing something like nix install foo to just work after nix search foo has succeeded would be a worthy goal.