cryzed

Disclaimer: Please follow this guide being aware of the fact that I'm not an expert regarding the things outlined below, however I made my best attempt. A few people in IRC confirmed it worked for them and the results looked acceptable.

Attention: After following all the steps run gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders --update-cache as root, this prevents various gdk-related bugs that have been reported in the last few hours. Symptoms are varied, and for Cinnamon the DE fails to start entirely while for XFCE the icon theme seemingly can't be changed anymore etc.

Check the gist's comments for any further tips and instructions, especially if you are running into problems!

Screenshots

Results after following the guide as of 11.01.2017 13:08:

edolstra

General notes

• nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

• By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

  @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.