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On one hand, I find Nix/NixOS fascinating, and I think package management should go in this direction. On the other hand, there is a weird dichotomy between nix-env and the main nix file, and I find that fairly common tasks such as "tell me the contents of package X" or "let's read the distro changelog and the upstream changelog for package X" to be either unintuitive or impossible.

Not to bash Nix(OS) developers, because I think they're doing a great job.

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Yes, in general you can't say "what version of X am I using?". You have to ask: "what version of X, the derivation Y is using?". You can see the contents of package X on your system, there's no index provided online for that. Also "contents of package X" is too general for nix, it's "contents of package X built with inputs Y", you may have the same package X built in different ways in your nix store. It's not impossible, there's the need of a service that provides information on what packages provide a certain file.

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