What I'd really like to see is a realistic, end-to-end tutorial for either 1) deploying a relatively straightforward web application (like Dokuwiki or ZNC), or 2) setting up a basic desktop for day-to-day use. I feel like I've seen a lot of "snippets", I feel like I understand how Nix works and what it's supposed to be good for, but I don't have a coherent sense of the steps involved in actually using it for mundane things.
Nix contributor here. You are completely right, that is missing. Unfortunately the documentation is somewhat fragmented and its structure makes it quite hard to find relevant information, especially to newcomers.
We started to work on making official guides for common Nix tasks, about how to get a development environment set up, how to build a Docker image… focus is on the DevOps side at the moment, not so much on the desktop user, as we see that as the most valuable use case. This is part of the work of the NixOS marketing team to facilitate adoption of Nix into the mainstream.
Have a look at https://nix.dev/ for the first guides being worked on – pretty barebones so far, but we are aware and working on it.
Yeah I was trying to do Linux things on my Chromebook and some blog or other recommended Nix as package manager. I was like cool this is like apt-get but trendy I'll try it.
I then proceeded for like an hour to try and figure out how you say apt-get install in Nix. There was all this documentation but none of it said "here's how you install emacs and stop thinking about Nix"
But I do agree with you, it's not as straight-forward as it should be yet. But I absolutely love how I can be certain that no garbage is accumulating on my computer like I needed this program one time and I don't even know what does it do, yet I have it's complete dependency graph installed that the package manager can barely uninstall.
In nix I just create a `nix-shell -p package` for one time use, do my work and then forget about it. At the next `nix-collect-garbage` it will be removed from my computer completely.
Perhaps I misremembered how many of them make throw shade on dotfiles repos, or perhaps it is just that google isn't good at finding such things ("not dotfiles" won't work).
