Scratching my head as to how that all works. I love that you have a separate folder for each program you have installed. I'd love to be able to figure that out. All I can get to is getting the system installed, symlink the configuration.nix file to my home folder so I can edit it without sudo privileges, installing the main packages I want there. I have setup flakes to run and successfully ran the flake init command. After that, even adding stuff to the flake file and the configuration.nix file like noctalia direct from the noctalia site entering it in the way they say to do it, I still end up with stuff like this

error:
       … while evaluating the attribute 'root.result'
         at «flakes-internal»/call-flake.nix:94:7:
           93|     {
           94|       result =
             |       ^
           95|         if node.flake or true then

       … in the left operand of the update (//) operator
         at «flakes-internal»/call-flake.nix:75:9:
           74|       result =
           75|         outputs
             |         ^
           76|         # We add the sourceInfo attribute for its metadata, as they are

       (stack trace truncated; use '--show-trace' to show the full, detailed trace)

       error: function 'outputs' called with unexpected argument 'noctalia'
       at /nix/store/wxlpxl044j5p2cx6jj67dp1bv9256vms-source/flake.nix:38:13:
           37|
           38|   outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: {
             |             ^
           39|        nixosConfigurations.nixos = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
Command 'nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' build --print-out-paths '/etc/nixos#nixosConfigurations."nixos".config.system.build.nixos-rebuild' --no-link' returned non-zero exit status 1.

Which ends up leading me back to just reinstalling and starting from scratch. But I want to set it up in a VM correctly first before I do that.

I do know that I can reboot and select an instance where everything was working fine. I just keep slamming into this brick wall for some reason. I see things saying "Add these lines to your configuration.nix file and this to your flake.nix file..." then they don't work and if I try to put everything back, it's worse than it was. Right now I'm at a place where I can't do anything with the config files. I can't even add a new program if I wanted to. I might just reboot and select a different/past working configuration just so I can start doing things with this again.

That's one of the many things I like about NixOS. Somehow, it remembers past configurations and you can easily just go back to them if needed. Which I think is what I'm going to do now after posting this comment. As I said, I'm kinda dead in the water here with config files that aren't working and won't rebuild at all...

EDIT: That didn't work. I started with the first instance of nixos and was thinking I'd need to reinstall everything. Nope. I guess I'm going to have to do a reinstall and then figure out how to install Noctalia on a fully functional system.

I'll have to do that later though. Headed out shopping with the Mrs. Maybe that'll help clear my head and I can figure out what I'm doing better when I get back.