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Most people who use Nix don't ever "install packages". It's a very niche and weird thing to want to do, so yes, you won't find good documentation.
by otabdeveloper4 4y ago
Most people who use Nix don't ever "install packages". It's a very niche and weird thing to want to do, so yes, you won't find good documentation.
- dizhn 4y agohttps://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/introduction.html https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/introduction.html "package manager" is literally in the first sentence.
- rgoulter 4y agoRight. Installing packages isn't a niche or weird thing in any way. Nix does have equivalents to "apt install <package>", etc... but, it's prone to "I forgot I did that / I didn't know I did that", and problems arising from that. (Other distribution package managers like apt-get or pacman require installing packages as root; but with nix packages should be installed as non-root. And the nix command to update installed packages isn't intuitive). What's typically encouraged is to instead install packages as part of the NixOS configuration, or as part of a home-manager configuration. Or, just using commands like "nix shell nixpkgs#<package>", which just adds the program to the path in the current shell, without installing it. (Which is a neat feature of nix).