I’ve been using NixOS for about two years but never tried home-manager!
Today I thought I would give it a go and I was immediately struck by one question.
One of the central ideas around NixOS is being ‘declarative’. So when I went to the Home Manager Manual (link to manual) I was surprised that it first starts with telling a NixOS (option 2) user to;
If I ‘search’ in ‘packages’, I can see there is a ‘home-manager’ package. (link to package)
Wondering why the guide for first-time users doesn’t say -‘add this to your configuration.nix’ as running any kind of command seems to be imperative? Thoughts and perhaps has anyone seen a first-time user guide that is declarative?
But it’s obviously flawed, because you actually want your Home Manager release to determine your Nixpkgs version rather than passing it in. Unfortunately Home Manager’s interfaces are weird in many regards, and the technically correct solution would be fix those first – then there won’t be much left to explain. But that’s a lot more effort which I won’t invest before I have a very clear idea for what the final result should be like.
I did not win! I struck multiple issues trying to ‘pin’ home-manager to a previous version of NixOS (23.11) which is currently less than 2 weeks out of date!
As an aside - For me personally, one of the key things I want in an OS is the ability to decide how and when I do updates.
(home-damager 
)