Hey, I was wondering about the current status of the NixOS wiki.

From reading its history page and the linked issue discussions I gather that there was some rather unsavory history leading to it now being inofficial and operated outside of the NixOS project since 2016.

However, while the original plan when closing the original wiki seems to have been to move documentation from the wiki to the official manuals, that doesn't seem to have happened in any larger capacity in the years following the inofficialization. The wiki still seems to be the only place to have you-want-X-do-Y-instructions with usable snippets and stuff like that for most tasks.

E.g. I was just searching for setting up printers, and there's no mention of printing in the manuals, but there is a wiki page (which is where I would expect something like that anyway from my experience with other distros). Also, for a lot of search queries on Google etc. of the type "nixos how to X" the wiki will come up first, because the manuals don't have a lot of stuff like that. The wiki is probably the de facto landing page for a lot of newbies to NixOS (see also this post of mine). Or for another there's no mention of how to set up Docker or Podman, no mention in the manual that I could find, but there are wiki pages with convenient snippets.

Sadly, the wiki pages often are outdated or otherwise lacking, and I'd like to improve them. However, my problem is: is it a good idea to put effort in improving the wiki? Or am I wasting effort on a deprecated project that's not really part of the Nix documentation effort? And if the wiki is indeed supposed to be deprecated, are there plans to add more you-want-X-do-Y-instruction-stuff for NixOS to the manuals? Would my example of "how to set up a printer" be well-suited for the manuals and should I add something like that there? Or is it better suited for the wiki (like other distributions handle it), regardless of it being inofficial?

In short, I mainly want to know where I'd best focus my efforts if I want to start helping on improving docs for how to do stuff on NixOS. If anyone has any insights of the situation or maybe some links to where I can keep reading up on it, I'd appreciate it!

Nicolas Lenz: basically, https://nix.dev is what you're looking for. it's an official project (even though the website doesn't reflect that, and we should absolutely change that asap), and it's supported by the nix documentation team. it's intended to be the place for how-to's (among other things), which as you correctly point out, are out of scope for a manual.

if you want to contribute, you can just go ahead and file a PR, but you are also very welcome to ask questions here first, or hop on one of our meetings (in room desc)

Nicolas Lenz: basically, https://nix.dev is what you're looking for. it's an official project (even though the website doesn't reflect that, and we should absolutely change that asap), and it's maintained by the nix documentation team. it's intended to be the place for how-to's (among other things), which as you correctly point out, are out of scope for a manual.

if you want to contribute, you can just go ahead and file a PR, but you are also very welcome to ask questions here first, or hop on one of our meetings (in room desc)

fricklerhandwerk: do you know what's blocking us from making nix.dev look more official? Thinking of things like:

• copyright footer mentioning Domen Kožar
• style being different
• lack of link from nixos.org
• no mention of it being official in landing page