> I just wanted to take a quick look at hyprland, I imagined I just use an existing config, I never thought it would need hours of research.
It shouldn't.
You'd want a simple flake to start with that has home-manager (for higher chance of finding declarative vest practice configs and modules) and to add small things to that.
I imagine you tried grabbing someone's complex config, modifying it, and ran into issues?
Flakes will hopefully be that soon but I wouldn't recommend starting with flakes when learning Nix in 2023. They're experimental and you still need to learn most of flake-less Nix (except channels and NIX_PATH) anyways.
When I started learning/using NixOS about two years ago I found it useful to start out with just Nixpkgs (i.e. what you get out of the box) and only add libraries when I felt they would help me. My first configs where ugly as hell and full of bad practice but the cool thing about Nix is that it gives you a lot of safety nets to enable experimentation and refactoring.
> Flakes will hopefully be that soon but I wouldn't recommend starting with flakes when learning Nix in 2023. They're experimental and you still need to learn most of flake-less Nix (except channels and NIX_PATH) anyways.
I've used Nix for a decade and wouldn't recommend the confusing and horrible user experience of Nix without flakes.
Additionally, if you are using github for code examples, you'll have far more success using flakes.
Many experienced people a new user would get help from, including myself, have long since washed their hands of prw-flakes issues and arcana like channels issues.
> Flakes will hopefully be that soon but I wouldn't recommend starting with flakes when learning Nix in 2023.
That Flakes provide a consistent entrypoint (and a consistent schema for such) into a codebase would have deferred a significant amount of confusion I had when getting started with Nix.
> They're experimental
The functionality as-is hasn't been changed. The 'experimental' flag itself hasn't been a practical problem.
However, flakes still have some rough edges & design problems to them, and there's some disagreement in the community over how flakes were rolled out.
I'd say for an end user, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
> ... and you still need to learn most of flake-less Nix (except channels and NIX_PATH) anyways.
I think the phrase "flake-less Nix" paints the wrong idea. I'd instead put it: Most of what you need to learn about Nix is unrelated whether the Nix evaluation started from a Flake or not.
It shouldn't.
You'd want a simple flake to start with that has home-manager (for higher chance of finding declarative vest practice configs and modules) and to add small things to that.
I imagine you tried grabbing someone's complex config, modifying it, and ran into issues?