[xrd]

This is the best comment I've read on nix yet!

I've been using nix as my daily OS for six months and I'm able to be productive. At the same time, I'm often confused as to whether I should use nix-shell, nix-env or modify my configuration files.

Thanks for the great comment.

[SkyMarshal]

I'm new to NixOS too. My general rule is to try to keep my core system build/description as minimal as possible. Default to nix-shell first, and only if I'm using that thing repeatedly do I then test-install it with nix-env, and if that succeeds then add it to configuration.nix.