Honestly the great failing of nix is that the new user experience is utterly terrible. I personally bounced off nix several times before I finally just grit my teeth and embraced the suck.

I think the best you can really do is look at the community. The nix project does have documentation but it is indecipherable, and I say this as someone who mostly likes nix and uses it daily.

https://zero-to-nix.com is a pretty good resource. I think they’re trying a bit hard to “framework” nix that maybe isn’t my preference, but the getting started guide is the best I’ve found so far.

Also, use your search engine of choice to find articles on nix, home-manager, nix-darwin (if you’re using a Mac), and find repos out there of other people’s dotfiles. Then get used to confusion and frustration for a while.

I still think that it has been worth it for me, personally… but there is real pain in the learning.