[Macha]

Is there an actual tutorial on how to use the nix command? All the official docs for Nix seem to be slightly discouraging it as not ready where they do mention it.

It's one where the community is pretty clear don't use nix-env etc. but the tutorials only explain nix-env, with the only details of the new commands being the CLI reference manual which doesn't cover workflows.

[phaer]

Yes, my understanding is that the official documentation lags behind community usage, because flakes are still an "experimental" feature as details of the implementation are worked out.

For reference documentation, there's "experimental commands" in the manual https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/experimental...

[barkingcat]

I'm finding nix-env to be great! I do not understand why nix offers a command and a package index, but then advises not to use it.

If people aren't supposed to use nix-env, why don't nix put a huge deprecated notice on every invocation and delete the nix-env command itself from nix?

[Macha]

I think the problems with nix-env come down to two things:

- nix-env -i and nix-env -u will almost certainly eventually do the wrong thing for you if you use them enough (nix-env -iA is ok): https://ianthehenry.com/posts/how-to-learn-nix/ambiguous-pac...

- It's not reproducible as it depends on the state of your nix-channel setup at that time. How much of a problem this is depends on your use case. nix-as-homebrew-replacemnt or nix-as-shared-package-list-across-osx-and-linux users are probably fine with this, as what these users care about is more portability than reproducibility, but nix-as-predictable-dev-environment types will be let down by it.

I think the fact that the latter affects different users differently and that the new flake world doesn't offer a "modify your global environment without the tool taking over" option (expecting you to use nixOS or nix-darwin instead) has meant that there's not enough motivation to agree on a replacement that nix-env could tell you to use instead.

I guess the eventual replacement will be "nix profile", but while you'll find at least some documentation on "nix develop" and "nix flake", I had to look in the CLI tool docs for this one, which makes me suspect it's even less final than the other two

So instead the community will tell you to avoid nix-env, but there's no agreement to have the tool or docs tell you that.