this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Welcome to the club. Nixos is fabulous. There's a steep learning curve though, and I still don't really get flakes and home manager.
Oh, it's very simple. Home-manager is something not yet finalized, optional and unofficial. Flakes was added in Nix 2.4, but you don't have to use it all. You don't want to add unnecessary complications. You can do without home-manager and flakes on a single-user machine. This is just one of the system configuration options. I have tried deploying the system with flakes/home-manager, done it with docker and even with
nix-env
. The performance gain is not noticeable.HM seems worth the effort only if you do a lot of customizing and tweaks to your home setup. Would that be an accurate assessment?
Home manager and flakes is something optional in today's NixOS. I don't see any obvious use for a single-user home system. Of course, many people go the flakes-setup route. NixOS has many customization options, up to and including docker installation.