Troubleshooting

Arranged by what you noticed, not by what caused it.

“I removed it and it is still installed”

The most common one, and it is not a fault.

You removed it from the selection. If the package is also declared somewhere in your own NixOS configuration, that declaration is untouched and still installs it. See the boundary.

Check with:

grep -rn "the-package-name" ~/.config/nixos --include=*.nix

“My packages are not listed”

Same cause, different symptom. The Selection tab lists what nixarchy manages, which on a machine that had a configuration before nixarchy is a small fraction of what is installed. How it works explains why, and why making the list longer would be worse.

“Nothing happened when I pressed the key”

Three likely reasons, in order:

1. It was queued, not installed. Look at the footer. If it says 1 change queued, it worked — press a.
2. The row was a .settings row (≡). Those configure an app rather than being one; the panel says so in the message line.
3. A writer refused. The message line above the footer is where that appears. It is easy to miss and it is the machine answering you.

“Everything says it is free”

The index is stale. A search index built before unfree and broken flags existed carries none of them, so every package reads as free.

The panel says index stale — r to rebuild when this is the case. Press r. It takes about a minute.

An absent flag is absent evidence, not a “no”.

“a seems to hang”

It is probably waiting for a password on a machine with no polkit agent to show the prompt, or for an answer to a question the panel cannot draw.

Press SHIFT+A instead — the same apply, in a real terminal, where you can see and answer whatever it wants.

“I pressed ESCAPE during a build and it kept going”

Correct. ESCAPE stops you watching the log; it does not stop the build. See Applying changes.

“It refused an unfree package”

It did not, quite. The writer adds the package and then tells you whether your machine’s licence policy will let the rebuild use it. If allowUnfree is off — which is unusual, and means somebody turned it off deliberately — it also scaffolds a commented allowUnfreePredicate naming just that package, for you to uncomment.

Read the message line. That scaffold is a licence-policy edit sitting in your apps.nix, commented out, waiting for you.

“Adding from the other channel wants two presses”

Yes. The channels share no store paths, so it brings an entire second closure — nixarchy doctor measures vlc at 1.5 GB. The first press tells you what it will cost; the second does it. See Packages.

“I want to see what it would do, without a panel”

nixarchy-pkg pending | jq

From a terminal has the rest.

Still wrong

nixarchy doctor checks the machine rather than the panel, and is the right next step for anything that smells like configuration rather than interface.

If it is the panel, the source is small and commented: github.com/olafkfreund/nixarchy-pkg.