oh, i had the same question for months. until someone replied with a “welp, all you can do is pretty much just to manually type keywords in”. and yeah, i had a bad habit of downloading stuff as packages, when i realised that 50% of the things i have, got an option as a better alternative. and i mean like proper BUNDLES of preconfigured stuff. so, for example, if you install a pkgs.gnome-desktop
, youre probably not gonna get even a working session. you will have to go to that search engine page and just type in “gnome”, and usually that is enough to get what you need, but you can be a bit more specific like “gnome desktop”, and then you will see a services.desktopManager.gnome.enable
, where .enable
is usually the option that installs lots of things and packages, that you can also exclude and configure, and stuff, but by looking up what’s services.desktopManager.gnome.
is (tip: leave a dot “.” at the end for a more natural sorting), you can see that there’s even more stuff, but this was just an example. this way, you can install pkgs.steam
and other stuff, like servers, firewall, gamescope
, udev rules, joystick support, blah blah blah, IN ONE LINE as an option, which doesnt come as a pkgs.steam
package, besides, that package is just a bunch of libraries and not even the client. you know what i mean? its really hard to explain, but… BASICALLY look an option up FIRST, if there are no results (cos theres no need or ppl are lazy), then the package.
that said, i have a filthy config that i use for multimedia (and production!) AND gaming. 10k lines in one configuration.nix
, it has stuff commented out everywhere for all occasions, even though i am not really planning on publishing this anywhere… i still have ~1200 lines of packages and the rest are options, its utterly unreadable and i love it, and if it sounds a lot, well, thats just 1% of the nixpkgs
, so no, thats not much, you know! i had to manually, one by one, sweep through each and every package to look up their option, if there is one. you dont wanna do that, so get yourself a habit of looking up OPTIONS first, alright?
also, in case you got a black screen after rebooting… nixOS is a distro that has rollbacks by default. not of filesystems, but of configs (which is better!), so check your bootloader 