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Comment by jcmfernandes | Hacker News Reader

I'm relatively new to nix, and this cut close:

> At this point NixOS has been around for 2 decades, but it still feels like it has not settled on good recommended workflows for incoming users.

Yes. This was a major pain point when I was getting started. The IRC community has been helpful in this regard. I also really don't like that nixpkgs serves as both a lib and a package set. Be one! I don't want "special" inputs in my config.

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> good recommended workflows for incoming users

Users of what exactly?

Workflows for configuring a desktop to play Steam games is vastly different from workflows for managing a cattle fleet of enterprisey servers.

On how to assemble your config. Every config I open does things a little bit different, from the get-go, when using flakes. Add package sets as overlays to nixpkgs or pass inputs downstream? How to parametrize "system"? What's stuff like flake-parts and flake-utils for? Should I use them? All these came to my mind on the first day.

It's not really a "config", it's actually a program that plugins into your infrastructure-as-code process to build system images. As expected, people here love to bikeshed and have vastly different opinions on "best practices".

I understand that, but even nixos refers to configuration.nix as a "configuration file" in its documentation.

IMO, it's totally OK that people have different opinions on what are best practices. However, I would still like to see official documentation showing beginners how to do things, comparing a few options.

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