I'm going to preempt this with anything not explicitly forbidden is allowed, lest this come off as "you holding it wrong".
Using the CLI to add/remove package is considered kind of an antipattern in nix. The correct way to write a fair bit of Nix (the language) to install and configure things. That then can be versioned, forked, etc.
There are a lot of really cool parts of Nix, but they're under a ball of rough edges.
Yeah, the hard part is maintaining a file just to have the tools you want is a major hurdle that is not reasonable for most people to jump over. If I'm working I might do something like this:
curl example.com/data.json | jq ...
and I'll realize I don't have `jq` installed. I do not want to open vim, edit a configuration file, and then re-run a command to rebuild my system. I just want jq. I can't change context like that just to get a package.
I understand this isn't aligned with the purity stance that nix has but if they were able to allow this use case, it would most likely get more people doing it the right way eventually.
I can't drink all the kool-aid at once, I really need to replace bits of my workflow at a time and I can't do that with nix currently.
The approach I've laid out in my original comment (using `nix-env`) provides a bad developer experience and makes me not able(willing?) to move forward with the adopting more of the practices. If the initial experience was better, I'd invest more time learning more.
> Yeah, the hard part is maintaining a file just to have the tools you want
I'd be okay doing that to install packages but what I don't like is the N number of ways to install packages. Do I use nix-env? Do I use the new nix CLI? Do I make an entry in configuration.nix? Do I use this thing called flakes which is marked as experimental but almost everyone seems to be onboard with it?
There's no central and definitive source of documentation either. There's the official NixOS website, nix pills, nixos.wiki, blog posts from prominent developers, and other sources I don't remember.
Oh I don't disagree. The onboarding experience is terrible.
* You have to learn a new and kind of knobbly single use language.
* If you are going the NixOS route there's the non-trival learning curve for that as well.
* And the package manager itself is more than a little confusing.
As for the workflow. I use NixOS on my personal machine. I'm fine with it because its typically pretty quick and happens infrequently. Buuuuuuut I wouldn't really advocate for NixOS. Its cool. I like it. I'm never going to recoop the time and effort I spent learning how to use it.
Using the CLI to add/remove package is considered kind of an antipattern in nix. The correct way to write a fair bit of Nix (the language) to install and configure things. That then can be versioned, forked, etc.
There are a lot of really cool parts of Nix, but they're under a ball of rough edges.