Recently started using NixOS, and nix.dev has been very useful thanks!

Some more NixOS-specific stuff would be really nice, if it’s in scope. I think a lot of the power of NixOS comes from the composition aspect, but I haven’t managed to figure out how mkOverride, mkIf, mkDefault and everything else actually work (rather than at a superficial level). I’m not sure if something as simple as adding an item to an option list from 2 separate bits of config is possible for example.

Along the same line, another thing I’ve found hard to discover is patterns used in the standard library. For example, I recently learned about makeBinPath from some random Nix file, and I’d really like some way of discovering quality of life stuff like that without needing to randomly come across it in some Nix code.

I would like to see it mentioned how to use Nix as a system package manager in MacOS. This guide was exactly what I needed: https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/macos-nix-setup/ and the official documentation made no mention of nix-darwin.

It was frustrating reading all the official intro documentation on Nix and it only talking about nix-env (not declarative AFAIK) or how to use Nix for per-project dependencies.

A couple of things come to mind that I'm struggling with now:

1. how to install outside of NixOS, mostly to use home-manager, in a flake-y way using the new `nix profile` thing that supercedes nix-env. The few folks I've spoken to seem to prefer to use NixOS as a shell, then to manage their dotfiles with home-manager, and trying to figure out how to manage this global state in profiles with flakes (e.g. I've heard ~/.config/nixpkgs/flake.nix is the location, but hits on a web search for this file name are almost non-existent).

2. how does one _develop_ with flakes. I get confused about how to use the repl to add something into my config (thankfully there's :lf now!). Some simple walkthrough that goes from packaging a simple application and troubleshooting in the repl, using shell to check the build stages, etc, would be extremely useful. Once one gets over this hurdle, Nix becomes an extremely attractive tool to bundle existing code and manageg packages, and new users start to see the power of it.

I’ve only read the bit on ad hoc shells but so far this is the best nix resource I’ve seen. Thanks for the hard work.

I hope you take the time to read the whole series, Domen! It's like a perfect test case to drive the kind of docs you've put so much effort into— an extremely detailed experience report

Thanks to nix.dev, I can run some commands and get a feel for what nix is in a single night rather than wading through the documentation. Apart from how to use nix, I see the need for resources on what problems it solves and how it solves it.

Are there any resources on taking a production example of issues we face on a daily basis and solve it with Nix and explain in a way without someone has to actually learn all of Nix in the first place ?

Thinking of practical production problems. We are using docker at work and it is great for deployment. But for dev setup it was painful.

Let me give you an example, I need three services running to be able to make changes to a package. The 3 services comes from the registry, so no docker files locally. As for docker-compose.yml it just starts the 3 services and builds the docker file for the package.

Now for the dev environment the way we are solving it is by creating a docker-compose.override.yml style. This works great isn't it ? The problem is we still need to support python2( I know, please don't judge). So we ended up with 2 dev environments one for each python version. So at the end I have two docker files for each version of python. 4 docker-compose files, one for dev and one for deployment. ( There are projects which reduced the docker-compose.yml files by adding the python-2 and 3 in the same file as different services but yes it blew up the file )

We might be overdoing this and completely wrong in the way we approached. I am open for feedback.

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