This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nixos by /u/JJ_Ramsey on 2025-06-30 00:29:19+00:00.

I’ve already bellyached about the specifics of my problems over at discourse.nixos.org, so I won’t belabor them here. Instead, I’ll describe the gist of the song-and-dance I’ve been dealing with:

1. Do something that works on a FHS-based Unix-like distro, but fails to work in NixOS, possibly causing a crash and, if I’m “lucky”, leaving a confusing error message.
2. Google furiously and if possible, search for the error message, while going down a rabbit hole and spending too much time tinkering with my system to figure out the problem. (Banging one’s head against a wall is optional here, but highly likely, at least in a metaphorical sense.)
3. Eventually find out that the problem is due to some app looking for some resource – a typelib and a Gsettings schema in my cases, possibly something else for somebody else – that would be in some “canonical” location on an FHS-based distro but is in some subdirectory of /nix/store with a hash in it.
4. Temporarily “solve” the problem by setting an environment variable of some subdirectory of /nix/store until I can figure out the proper NixOS fix – presuming that one exists.

I suppose I have two questions:

1. What are the “proper” NixOS fixes for this sort of thing, where by “proper” I mean something resembling the “canonical” Nix way rather than a possibly fragile hack?
2. How can I minimize (or better yet, avoid) having to go down some rabbit hole to find out why something is failing?

(Honestly, what I really want to do is wave a magic wand so that the NixOS developers are no longer so married to the idea of avoiding global state that they compromise usability, but that’s not going to happen.)