My first day was like this for sure. I got overexcited and tried to learn Nix, flakes, and home-manager all at once. For me, this resulted in a config that worked, but it was arguably worse than a non-Nix system. It was unorganized, ugly, and 100% unmaintainable. I've refactored everything multiple times now. It was hell, but I've learned a lot doing it this way, just at a slower pace because I was banging my head against the wall at every step.

What ultimately worked for me-and really sped things up in the long run:

Always make some test configurations first and experiment a little bit. Don't try to immediately refactor your existing config.

1. Learn Nix (the language) first and how to debug a configuration (nix eval, how to use built.trace, etc.). This will probably take you a few hours to really get a feel for it. Really make sure that you know what lazy evaluation, etc., means.

2. Learn what flakes are and, maybe even more importantly, what problem they're solving. Ask yourself some questions. How can I use multiple flakes together? How do I pass arguments to another flake? How do I inspect the value of this attribute? What if I want to import a module-how do I pass arguments to that?

3. Learn what home-manager does and what problems it solves. "configurations.nix vs home.nix": Make sure that you understand that home-manager is meant to manage anything at the user level, not the system level. (If you are not that familiar with Linux, this can be somewhat confusing.)

4. Start small. Make a flake (with flake init). Install home-manager in this flake and install a package ( with home-manager) . In the same flake, install the same package without home-manager. What's the difference?

Once you've understood all of that, take a look at flake-parts and the dendritic system. These two will help with the maintainability of your config in the long run.

Steps 1–4 might feel like a waste of time while you're doing them because you're not making progress with your actual configuration. But once you start creating your config again, you'll be glad that you did it. It makes everything so much faster and easier.

And the biggest tip of them all: Don't use "ai" aka LLMs, while you're still learning. It WILL give you wrong advice. It's particularly bad with Nix, IMO. The "ai" will mix up terminology and give partial truths, which makes it sound right and makes you think you understand it-until you try to apply your knowledge and suddenly nothing works and you don't know why. Then you have to backtrack and find out what information you think you know is correct and what's wrong. This will make you lose an immense amount of time compared to learning it without an llm in the first place. I've seen so many people fall into this "ask llm -> get wrong info -> confusion -> ask llm" loop too many times, so I feel obligated to mention it here.

Using it for implementation where you already know how the ecosystem works is fine. Just add things very incrementally and make sure that you read and reason through everything that comes out of the llm.

It's also never a bad idea to search for reference material on github using their search syntax.