R

A

Personally I just put all my packages in configuration.nix (well, broken up into different files but all in environment.systemPackages). I only use home manager for extra config options for programs like Git, Neovim, or VSCodium. I only have one user so I see no reason for me to separate them.

I never use the flakes search, if I find a flake on github or somewhere then it will say how to add it as a flake input and enable it. That’s mostly for extra modules or things like beta versions of software that haven’t been added to the official repos yet, almost all of my packages are from the standard packages.

I switched to NixOS almost two years ago, and it’s really nice being able to define my whole system in a single set of config files. If my hard drive dies or I switch computers, I can just reinstall NixOS using my config files and everything will be set up the exact same way. It’s extremely solid and I don’t need to baby my system because if it breaks I can just reinstall everything back to normal.

And I can share parts of the config between devices, so when I change my Neovim or VSCodium configs using Home-Manager it gets synced to my other devices, as well as being saved as part of my NixOS config files.