That's how it works normally, but once you get to the point of having the system configured declaratively, people strive for more. The home-manager as far as I

That's how it works normally, but once you get to the point of having the system configured declaratively, people strive for more. The home-manager as far as I know is not official component, but a lot of people add it because they love the idea. I think anyone who is interested in Nix should start with Nix Pills[1] they are concentrating on just nix and nixpkgs, but I think it is minimum getting started. Once you are familiar how to build nix derivations, adding custom components is not that hard. [1] https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html