synaptic (and probably also it's UI) is literally 19 years old. it's overwhelming and unintuitive.

for a user friendly design, look at modern software like elementary AppCenter, GNOME Software, Apple AppStore or even the microsoft store that no one uses...

For now you can only install flatpaks with it on nixos, but i hope that Nix supports packagekit and appstream metadata at one point and we can just use it as gui, or gnome software and maybe even discover from kde. installing packages should really be it's own program and there are good ones, we just have to support the standard API

NixOS/nixpkgs#94055
NixOS/nixpkgs#15932

https://blog.elementary.io/introducing-new-appcenter-categories/

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Software

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/apple-previews-all-new-mac-app-store/

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-microsoft-store-finally-gets-a-much-needed-overhaul-for-windows-10-and-windows-11/

so i suggest not to waste time on the package management and remove it as soon as nix supports the common linux gui package manager guis

focus on design for an intuitive interface to edit nixos config

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't realize there was an RFC for Appstream on nixos. If/when the RFC is merged, we can use it to create a more intuitive and informative package manager.

I agree with your point regarding Synaptics lack of intuitiveness and the better UX of modern package managers (especially the sleek OSX package manager you linked). However, I disagree with your second point: I'm not sure we can get away with excluding a (small) package manager from nix-gui.

nix-gui's goals is to provide a graphical interface for setting nearly any option, including nearly 400 list of packages options such as environment.systemPackages, hardware.firmware, and programs.zsh.ohMyZsh.customPkgs.

So I'm not entirely convinced that this can be a separate program. list of packages should be considered just another option type with a corresponding nix-gui FieldWidget.

Thanks again for your input, I hope to hear more feedback from you as this project progresses.

Yeah, the package related options make it hard to create a consistent experience. The package related options would have to be shown in the package manager GUI, maybe ask if the user wants to modify them when installing and show them in the app detail view. But that's probably not intended with the listed programs. Nix makes everything complicated. Why can't a user just install a program? We might have to give up on achieving the best user-friendliness and embrace the control nix offers in the most intuitive way possible.

A program listing could have an option to "modify package" and an easy UI do override the package definition. That could be a killer feature that no other package manager offers.

I think it should still be a separate program since installing an app and changing system settings are different tasks.

Not sure if we should fork one of these GUIs or if they might add our changes. We could research if packagekit and appstream support settings for packages or have an interface for modifying packages or if upstream would accept such additions.

I want the UX macOS or elementary OS provide, but NixOS makes that really hard and it might not be possible, because Nix is too powerful and we still want to provide this power to the end-user.

So the UI should really teach the user in an intuitive way, like environmental storytelling in games... that would be perfect.

A program listing could have an option to "modify package" and an easy UI do override the package definition. That could be a killer feature that no other package manager offers.

Absolutely. Assisted package overrides (and overrides in general) are planned https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui/milestone/4

Not sure if we should fork one of these GUIs or if they might add our changes.

For now I think the MVP should include a list of packages, a textbox to search and filter, a checkbox to add the package to the list, and a display of the list.

In the future, PackageKit (or ideally Appstream, but that seems much further from realization) definitely should be used in a reimplemented form of the package manager with enhanced UX.

So the UI should really teach the user in an intuitive way, like environmental storytelling in games... that would be perfect.

Yes, this is a great way to put it. Nix-Gui might be viewed as a tool to smooth the learning curve of nix.

Nix-Gui might be viewed as a tool to smooth the learning curve of nix.

yes, that's the potential, but it's also a very hard design problem

it sounds good so far, let's see how it will turn out

Have you checked out other attempts on the problem and considered contributing there instead of starting from scratch?

https://github.com/pmiddend/nixos-manager
https://gitlab.com/juliendehos/nix42b
https://github.com/matejc/nixui

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/cu4dle/should_nix_have_a_gui/ discussion

nixui is abandoned and nix42b isn't a configuration tool.

nixos-manager is the closest thing to this project by far. https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui/blob/master/docs/development.org#related

It's author has suggested that it would need to be rewritten because it uses deprecated graphics library pmiddend/nixos-manager#10 (comment)

I think nix-gui is the furthest along graphical configuration editor.

See https://github.com/vlinkz/nix-software-center and https://github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor