The matter of flakes is complicated. Yes they are experimental, but in reality most Nix users use them despite that. I’m a bit on the fence on whether you should start with flakes because they do add some complexity. You can copy paste a sample flake configuration from the Internet (there are many but they all do exactly the same things) and you’ll probably be fine but telling people to just copy paste code they don’t understand feels wrong as well.

Regarding documentation… I wouldn’t go as far as saying you should avoid it entirely but it is in a very unfortunate state with a lot of wiki pages being outdated or just containing snippets that do things in very weird ways, or are over engineered to the point of being incomprehensible.

And that’s if someone bothered to write up anything at all. It’s a bit sad but reading from the nixpkgs GitHub (or other people’s dotfiles) is sometimes the only way to get certain information, such as valid values for package overrides.

I wish there were more resources I’m just tryina point you in a general right direction. I should a included more stuff though.

1. Use Flakes You can think of flakes as declarative channels, with the added ability of using multiple channels at once and importing other flakes. I use both stable and unstable on my system and my flake has both. They also allow you to import other projects that use flakes a great example of this is base16.nix and my neovim config, try running nix run github:kyleraykbs/neovim and add the expirimental features flag it will complain at you about if you dont have flakes enabled.

2. To clarify, I ment declaratively, cause ‘the nix way’ isnt pure if you use channels and such, I could a been more clear about that sorry.

3. This is a complicated one… You aren’t reverse engineering it, its open source and in my opinion NixLang actually documents itself quite well, I haven’t had a problem with the readability of nixpkgs and there’s even a link to the source on search.nixos.org for any given option or package. On top of that NixOS is a rabbit hole of abstractions and at least personally I find it harder to build stuff for if I dont understand the layers of complexity that I’m standing on, reading the source is the only real way to do it as of current. But it is understandable that it might be hard to understand as a new user, and unfortunately my only suggestion is to read other peoples configs, that gave me a good idea of what to do and how to do it, still a pain of course but nix will hurt you a lot before it starts to get nice to use. Also once again vimjoyer is a wonderful resource for all of this.

4. It makes it so all config is done in NixLang and therefore can take full advantage of nix, it also allows you to drop your home configs or parts of it on on any machine with just the config. Its just nixos but for your home, and as I said in my last comment the more nix tracks on your system the easier your life is.

The learning curve just will be steep and as someone who got though its worth it.

My qualifications allow me to write flake on my own, and I have even tried doing it. But after a bit of figuring it out, I set the recommended ISO, connected an unstable channel (I used 24.05 back when it wasn’t mainstream), configured the whole system according to the NixOS Wiki and…used the system daily, delighted with its amazing flexibility and stability. I’ve described everything I don’t like about the “experimental features” here

I remember Dolstra writing on his blog that flakes' are needed to "ensure the best tolerance". Haha, I ensure portability of my system with a single yusb flash drive. I think Dolstra got tired of messing around with NixOS and wanted to reduce development costs by annoyingly suggesting a switch to flakes`.

Dude what are you on about? Channels are just imperative and that kinda goes against the purpose of nix same deal with why I recommend home manager, if you’re gonna do NixOS imo you should do it pure and it sounds like op wants that. The rest of your rant is absolutely unhinged.