Unfree software is unintuitively hidden for new users

[grahamc]

Issue description

New users try to install unfree software, search for it with nix-env -qaP, and find it missing. Some more enterprising users search nixpkgs on GitHub and find it is definitely there but don't know how to find it.

Example chat where this happened: https://botbot.me/freenode/nixos/2016-07-20/?msg=69976623&page=9

Perhaps a way to improve this would be show the unfree software in the list, but with a note about it being unfree.

Steps to reproduce

1. Be a new user who is evaluating NixOS/Nixpkgs
2. Try to install hipchat
3. Find it isn't in nix-env's list
4. Confirm it is in nixpkgs via GitHub
5. ??? until they find { allowUnfree = true; } or ask in IRC

[grahamc]

re:

• make nix-env -qa include unfree packages #5628
• nix-env --query should show unfree packages by default nix#432

I think this should be revisited. I think we're doing users a disservice by making it difficult to find the software they're wanting to choose. Right now we're choosing to appease strict FOSS users over reducing the headache for newcomers.

I'd rather the onus on more advanced users to get rid of it, than new users to get started with the tools they need and are familiar with.

[copumpkin]

Agree. I think this is largely an incidental consequence of not wanting Hydra to do unfree stuff, but I think the mechanism should be a made a bit more fine-grained to be friendlier to users.

[vcunat]

I tried, and I think it's hard to find strong consensus on this point.

Personally I'm comfortable that official nixpkgs accepts significantly wider range of packages than it's usual for most other large distributions. BTW, we're slowly shifting to specifying packages directly by attribute names, and in that case the user gets a useful evaluation error.

[grahamc]

BTW, we're slowly shifting to specifying packages directly by attribute names, and in that case the user gets a useful evaluation error.

Yeah, this error is really helpful if they get far enough to try to install it that way. A bit tough, though, to get that far when a nix-env search tells you it isn't there.

[abbradar]

I think we really do need to show the user somehow that there are other packages. I've taken a liking to this suggestion, option II. Other solution is to show such packages but place big red label "UNFREE" next to them.

EDIT: after some thoughts I like my solution less, because this heavily depends on what do we consider "promotion". The other suggestion, however, is very unobtrusive IMHO and doesn't even name anything, just says that there are matches.

[PlasmaShift]

Put the allow unfree information where people go and look at how to install software

When they generate your Nixos configuration and have kde and wget " I think that is the one package they show as an example to install" commented out put allow unfree in a comment there as well

When they look at the manual on how to install packages put a note somewhere really close so they see it. Probably at two places, one for nix "nix-env -i ... or nix-env -qa ..." and one for Nixos "inside your configuration.nix

when they search on Nixos.org packages in the description make a note, ex nonfree -- rest of description
in package name or attribute name it would would get in the way of normal operations. I am not concerned about nonfree when I am greping around nix-env -qa

These are the places I would go/went to find out how to install applications
This way would also not interfere with the nix way as describing your os

As a side note it would also be nice if when you generated configuraiton.nix you would get a stateless user example.

[peti]

The real issue is that nix-env -qa searches are fundamentally broken and don't find literally thousands of useful packages that we have. This phenomenon is not limited to unfree software.

[domenkozar]

This came up again today on irc:

22:50:36           tosmi | hi, i'm a nixos newbie and unable to install the citrix-receiver package   
22:51:09           tosmi | nix-env -qa | grep doesn't find citrix-receiver               
22:51:34           tosmi | i suppose because it depends on an EULA protected blob...                                                                  

[domenkozar]

I think Nix UI redesign is a good opportunity to fix this.

[grahamc]

Today a user on IRC (ToxicFrog) spent four hours trying to package Sublime3 only to find out it was hidden behind unfree.

[grahamc]

Today another user on IRC (riptawr) spent quite some time trying to figure out discrepancies between nixos-rebuild (as root) and nix-env (as his user) due to his profile not having allowUnfree.