Nautilus

Nautilus is the GNOME desktop's file manager. When using Nautilus without GNOME, you may need to enable additional services to get familiar functionality.

GVfs

If GVfs is not available, you may see errors such as "Sorry, could not display all the contents of “trash:///”: Operation not supported" when trying to open the trash folder, or be unable to access network filesystems.

To enable GVfs:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.gvfs.enable = true;

Then log out and back in, and verify that the GIO_EXTRA_MODULES environment variable is set.

When using X11, this is probably sufficient (though, see the general notes on running GNOME programs outside of GNOME). On Wayland, more effort may be required: [1].

Gstreamer

Unless you've installed Gstreamer plugins system-wide, the "Audio and Video Properties" pane under the "Properties" menu for media files will say "Oops! Something went wrong. Your GStreamer installation is missing a plug-in."

To enable the A/V Properties and see details like media length, codec, etc, the following overlay may be used:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

nixpkgs.overlays = [(self: super: {
  gnome = super.gnome.overrideScope' (gself: gsuper: {
    nautilus = gsuper.nautilus.overrideAttrs (nsuper: {
      buildInputs = nsuper.buildInputs ++ (with gst_all_1; [
        gst-plugins-good
        gst-plugins-bad
      ]);
    });
  });
})];