Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there’s a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that… just isn’t a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn’t need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone’s Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it’s a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There’s almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).

kwriteconfig6 is barely documented because you’re not really supposed to use it. All of the settings that users are expected to change are in the nice settings app that Plasma ships with. Using kwriteconfig (or equivalently a dconf editor on GNOME) is like editing the registry on Windows; you are implicitly opting into more power, out of most guardrails and into potential breakage. The UX being a bit questionable (though honestly it’s really not as bad as you’re saying, it does exactly what it sounds like it will do?) is to a degree intentional, because you’re not supposed to be using this unless you know what you are doing.

To be fair that’s not the entire story, since you need to actually resolve the conflicts first, which is slightly scary since your worktree will be broken while you do it and your Linter will be shouting at you.

You may also want a dedicated merge tool that warns you before accidentally commiting a conflict and creating a broken commit.

Oh and non trivial resolutions may or may not create an evil merge which may or may not be desirable depending on which subset of git automation features you use.

Using git status often is definitely good advice though.

I’m not sure why nix-env is so slow exactly but it’s the wrong tool to use anyways as it just throws away everything NixOS has going for itself in favour of pretending to be a normal package manager. You really just want to use the configuration file.

The “normal” way to install packages in NixOS would be using environment.systemPackages. The various programs.<name> options are intended for packages requiring additional setup, like shells or desktop environments (e.g. iirc for sway it creates a systemd target and adds the .desktop files for login managers to see it). Weston has a package but not an option, so you’d have to figure that additional stuff out yourself (but running Weston from a tty should just work).

There are additional ways to install packages for single users or using home-manager but you don’t need those.

This does kinda demonstrate why (I personally think) NixOS is so hard to learn: There’s a million different ways to do anything and each has it’s own weird gotchas. And critically most of them, even when they are honestly just legacy cruft, are not actually deprecated and may even have users advocating their use, or even if they don’t nobody bothered to remove that part from the wiki (if it was ever there to begin with).

You can also see this in the flake/channel split: One person in this very thread is telling you to use flakes, while another is telling you to stick with the default (channels).

And in some (fortunately relatively rare) cases even things that everyone agrees are bad ideas still get promoted in official documentation or other prominent places, like using nix-env -i under any circumstances, ever.

And it is definitely a learning problem you are having. You are facing the same problems as a new Linux user who just installed Manjaro with KDE 6 on Wayland and is wondering why apt-get and xrandr are not working even though those are accepted answers on Stackoverflow posts from 2012. Of course as experienced Linux users we know why, but a new one has to learn a lot of stuff before “getting it” and will probably stumble onto poor advice more than once in their journey. (And learning Nix is arguably worse than learning Linux for the first time, but that depends a bit on your exact experience and background.)

If you stick to learning NixOS there will be a point when these things seem trivial, but it will be a lot of effort to get there. Is that effort worth it? Well, if the term “declarative package management” doesn’t mean anything to you, maybe not. You do sacrifice a lot of things “just” to declare your entire system state in one configuration file (or more likely, directory). But I do think the things Nix does are really cool, if you can get over the, uh, everything.

To be fair this also happened to Eagle Dynamics, developer of DCS, the other “realistic” flight sim that players take far too seriously. Except there it was a Dev that got arrested in Georgia and extradited to the US…

While unfortunate, not shipping these standard Google apps is not really an option for any Android manufacturer due to Google requirements. Including them is required if you want to use anything from the GSM, which includes things like the Play Store and everything it touches. You can technically ship a different Android distribution like Lineage or /e/, but that’s not really what most people will be expecting of an “Android” phone and will narrow the viable target demographic even more than the value proposition already does.