I want to setup my configs using Nix and Home Manager but I just find it so confusing and not very user friendly. Every guide I’ve seen is either a really basic case of setting up a single package and config or an extremely complicated setup using Flakes that I can’t wrap my head around.
This guide I feel like falls more into the former, it gives you a really basic example but isn’t enough to go off for me.
Drake's book looks great. I appreciate his efforts to create a mental model and learning approach to NixOS.
I found a set of tutorials on YouTube by Will, to be incredibly helpful at the beginning of my NixOS journey. Even though these tutorials are a couple of years old, they should have aged well.
Drake's book, should help confirm some assumptions I've made about how NixOS works. Given NixOS's declarative nature, I find it easy to copy configurations to do what I want - a handy approach when pressed for time, but it does leave some gaps in understanding that need to be filled.
I think it is wise to use Nix for a bit before trying to manage all your user configs with it. Using `nix-shell` for project dependencies is a good starting point. You can't really make any costly mistakes here since the scope of any given project is likely much less than all your system and user configurations.
Nix shell plus something like direnv using flakes or nix expressions (non-flake approach) would give you a chance to learn the language and ecosystem. Once you feel comfortable with this, home-manager should be much more approachable.
This guide I feel like falls more into the former, it gives you a really basic example but isn’t enough to go off for me.