I recently installed NixOS on my server instead of Debian. OP most have done some really fancy stuff to have had the problems described, but I agree with having to relearn everything from scratch. As for flakes and home manager, I just ignored them. Too much to learn as is.
You won’t really need home-manager on a server anyways. It’s for managing the configuration files in your home-folder, so you might customize the shell of your root user with it and that’s about it.
Home-manager makes a lot more sense on desktop computers. I actually have kind of the opposite ‘problem’. I started out by using home-manager on a different distro and even though I switched to NixOS by now (because the other distro’s installation mysteriously imploded one day), I haven’t bothered to learn the non-home-manager way yet. You can do almost everything in home-manager, too, at least when you don’t need to administer for multiple users.
And as for Flakes, I feel like they sound a lot scarier than they are. If you’re just an end user (not trying to distribute Flakes to others), then it’s basically just a handful of different commands to use and one more Nix file at the root of your configuration. I had to sit myself down for an hour or so to figure that stuff out and I haven’t touched it much since then.
I can understand not prioritizing them, though. It’s not like you switch to Flakes and then everything is different. It’s mostly just a different way of doing things, a different set of complexity (they replace Nix Channels, for example), which makes your configuration more reproducible, should you ever need that.
I recently installed NixOS on my server instead of Debian. OP most have done some really fancy stuff to have had the problems described, but I agree with having to relearn everything from scratch. As for flakes and home manager, I just ignored them. Too much to learn as is.
You won’t really need home-manager on a server anyways. It’s for managing the configuration files in your home-folder, so you might customize the shell of your root user with it and that’s about it.
Home-manager makes a lot more sense on desktop computers. I actually have kind of the opposite ‘problem’. I started out by using home-manager on a different distro and even though I switched to NixOS by now (because the other distro’s installation mysteriously imploded one day), I haven’t bothered to learn the non-home-manager way yet. You can do almost everything in home-manager, too, at least when you don’t need to administer for multiple users.
And as for Flakes, I feel like they sound a lot scarier than they are. If you’re just an end user (not trying to distribute Flakes to others), then it’s basically just a handful of different commands to use and one more Nix file at the root of your configuration. I had to sit myself down for an hour or so to figure that stuff out and I haven’t touched it much since then.
I can understand not prioritizing them, though. It’s not like you switch to Flakes and then everything is different. It’s mostly just a different way of doing things, a different set of complexity (they replace Nix Channels, for example), which makes your configuration more reproducible, should you ever need that.