Multimachine setup issues

I’m still new to NixOS and am getting used to everything. I have a laptop and desktop both running NixOS but they have slightly different configs, at the moment, mostly nvidia vs intel specific changes.

I ran sudo ln -s ~/nixos-config/ /etc/nixos

I have my configuration.nix, flake.lock, flake.nix, and my system specific file defiant-configuration.nix in ~/nixos-config and I have setup a git repo.

When I run nixos-rebuild build --flake . I get the following error,

   error: getting status of '/nix/store/lkw0z9fjb39zxv1dvim38qj2zkqd6s76-source/defiant-configuration.nix': No such file or directory

If I remove the symlink and put everything back in /etc/nixos however everything seems to work fine and if alternatively I use an absolute path in my flake.nix file and run with --impure, it also seems to work fine. I suppose I could run --impure, however I am concerned that is not best practice. Is there something I am missing here to accomplish this properly?

My flake.nix (it only includes the one machine for now)

{
  description = "Nixos config flake";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, ... }@inputs: {
    nixosConfigurations.defiant = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      specialArgs = {inherit inputs;};
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix
        ./defiant-configuration.nix
      ];
    };
  };
}

Hi, I believe the easiest is to just move everything somewhere in your home folder, no longer use /etc/nixos, and declare the two hosts in your flake (they are many ways to handle options/specific config by host)