Nix is advanced alien technology that was badly damaged when it fell from the sky. In particular the docs/blogs/forums are net negative some ridiculously high amount of the time, like start composing an email: “I have a very special set of skills, and I will find you…” amount of the time.

But once it starts working: how does anyone do this any other way?

- The language is reasonably well-documented and those docs are rarely wrong.

- Learn bash, like really really learn bash.

- Check out nixpkgs and use that to figure out how to do stuff.

- Only do this if paying the entire cost in time and frustration in one aneurism-inducing spasm upfront is a worthwhile tradeoff for having everything work perfectly every time thereafter.

It’s kinda like being Paul Atriedes: you get magic powers but first you put your hand in the fucking box. What’s in the box?

“Nix!”

Something Nix seriously needs is a searchable index of people's nix configs. When I attempted to use it, I had tabs open for around 10 configs that I was cross referencing but I can't find that list of configs anymore and I have more obscure packages I'm trying to figure out how to use and don't want to manually search.

This is on top of a GUI (syncs with git repos, at minimum about:config like with the documentation inline and ability to edit free-form entries), a Nix-style installer (pulls your config from a git host, inline machine profile editor, formatting help and saves formatting to repo), maybe some languages improvements, etc

https://pastebin.com/raw/RkZvsKuL

This is my current list. I add them as a submodule to a repo.

ag -A10 'inputs' -G flake.nix

That is absolutely fantastic. Have you thought about putting that somewhere it will rank on Gooogle?