Yeah that’s a lot of what kept me out of most of home-manager’s functionality.
I will say, though, there are occasionally programs that have a lot of home-manager options yet few (if any) NixOS options (gammastep comes to mind), so I use it for those.
Also, configuring browsers with home-manager is fantastic!
Hey friend,
My recommendation is to keep things dead simple as you start out—no fancy channels or flake inputs and such, at least not where not necessary. I’ve found a lot of success in going slow, and not feeling rushed to do everything the NixOS way at first (for example, I still manage my dotfiles with GNU stow instead of home-manager). I started off with a very simple flake and basically just using my configuration.nix to declare packages, gradually learning more from there. The Nix ecosystem is as extremely powerful as it is poorly documented—it unfortunately sometimes takes a while to (as you’ve noted) even just find information.
I’ve linked below two sites I found unbelievably helpful in my journey—the first one helps you get up and running with a very simple flake (and, yes, you will want to use a flake, even if it isn’t obvious right now why), and the second one is a huge search engine of all NixOS options, the first place I check when I’m putting something new on my system.
Good luck!
I use GNU stow for my dotfiles because I like it better than the way home manager does it (but I still use home manager for other things). Big piece of advice I’d give is to just remember, as you learn Nix stuff and get all excited about “reproducibility” and “declaring” things, that you don’t have to do everything the Nix way. You could very easily have a single configuration.nix file that mostly just specifies packages and then do nearly everything else the old-fashioned way. It’s your system and your comfort. (But for the record, I used arch-based systems for a long time as well, and though it took me about a week to figure out what I was doing in a NixOS VM, the satisfaction when I finally deployed to bare metal and everything just worked exactly as I intended it to was quite nice). And as others have said here, nixpkgs is massive and likely has all of what you need.
To my knowledge, that is controlled by your window manager/DE.