• mvirts@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I do think it’s important to emphasize the difference between installing software in user environments and system wide, which is why the tool is named nix-env. System packages must be installed via the nixos configuration file and a rebuild.

    To me the biggest missing piece for new users is a tool to help manage your system configuration and reduce the frustration of having to constantly look up nix syntax or nixpkgs quirks. Maybe thinking of it as a nixos/nix IDE? Also a polished distribution built on nixos would be a good starting point (and easy to do, I didn’t realize I could just copy someone else’s configuration until well after I had my system working well enough)

    The other thing that got me starting out is the need to garbage collect old packages. It’s not strictly necessary if you have a large enough disk, but it took me several iterations of filling my root partition before I figured out how to properly clean up old generations.

      • mvirts@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I think ultimately

        Sudo nix-collect-garbage --delete-old

        Is my go-to command. For a while I was looking at generations manually, but now I just wait a while (days, a few reboots, or until I need more space) to run this after changing things in case the new stuff is broken.

        I think running this as my normal user cleans out old env generations… But I’m not 100% sure.