[altgans]

I think you can get going with little to no knowledge. Setup the system, choose a few cool options and packages, and go rebuild. Simple as that.

The difficulty comes from the advanced topics. Modularizing your setup, writing your own packages, generally going off the beaten path.

I did not do any of that (yet). I will in the future, but I am fine with my low-level setup. One machine, one user. A bit later I moved to Nix Flakes (which is just an additional wrapper file around the previously written config) and added a few overlays.

My trick: I downloaded every single public "NixOS" dotfile repository I could find, and then just used "ripgrep" to find anything I was interested in.

Another cool trick I read is setting up a VM to test a small config and get a feeling for it, and then decide if yo want to proceed.

[pxc]

NixOS' saving grace when it comes to the learning curve is that experimentation is extraordinarily safe, thanks to the declarative config and rollback functionality. If you don't know what you're doing, you can pretty painlessly get away with just fucking around.

[anandsuresh]

Not just that. The ability to enter a sandboxed shell environment, play around with as many packages as you can get your hands on, and then exit back to my clean machine is my absolute favorite feature!!!

SO many times in the past, I'd be concerned about installing new things because they'd break my otherwise pristine developer environment. Yes, rvm/nvm/virtualenv and others help, but they fail to hold a candle to the nix-shell!