Almost every NixOS tutorial I encounter, be that blog or video, says to use Flakes and Home Manager. While that definitely speaks to the value of these tools, I find myself, instinctually, wanting to avoid them. I’ve attempted to get them working multiple time, and encountered more issues than they solved, for me. I interpret this to mean my knowledge and/or use case of NixOS is not ready for me to use these tools effectively. On top of that, something about a set of files that could all be put into a single unified config appeals to me (which flakes/hm can probably do too, but hopefully to get my vibe).
My reasoning aside, this has made me curious if there is some way for me to “backport” all these configs I encounter into my set of more default style configs. The primary goal I have that lead me to this is rootless Podman and declaring my containers in the config. If anyone has any guidance or resources you could point me to it would be much appreciated.
They have their reason for being, flakes help with reproducibility by pinning the versions, whereas home manager helps with running stuff as non-root and in non-NixOS systems.
Your flake.nix can just have a default output that points to your configuration.nix and you're done. That's how my flake started.
Lots of good suggestions from people, and replying individually was going to be a mess. Please see the comment I added.