I also forgot to add one thing that tripped me recently but I am sure a solution exists for it that I am not aware of.

In Debian we do: apt-cache search <search string>

It gives quick results.

The equivalent in nix is (correct me if I am wrong, it has been a while since I did this): nix-env -qaP <search string>

This command takes so long to execute. On a tiny VPS, when I did this, it ran out of memory. I wish things like this are improved.