2xsaiko

If you want to use nix develop without flakes, you can use nix develop -f shell.nix. The benefit of flakes (or, well, pinning your nixpkgs for the project in general, flakes just make this easy) is that you can at any time in the future come back to the project and get a working setup instead of an incompatible Node version.

(Though, I use flakes for my projects but often tell direnv to override nixpkgs with the system nixpkgs when evaluating the shell so everything is in sync (with the --override-input nixpkgs nixpkgs option). Mostly because it means less duplicate downloads and libraries in the store.)

It’s accumulated a lot of cruft over its >20 years of existence. Especially the language, which can’t be changed due to otherwise breaking backwards compatibility.

There’s a difference. Without it, it loads the flake from /etc/nixos/flake.nix instead of the current directory. (What is redundant is the #, you can just write --flake .)

A while ago I watched a great video on Youtube explaining how a system without copyright could work for commercial software development (specifically for games), advocating for a “pay for production” model instead of “pay for access”. Unfortunately I can’t find the video anymore.

Welcome! I hope you enjoy NixOS =)

Ah yes, the eternal question, where to learn. I’ll just link you to a comment I wrote a couple days ago: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/254645