You should consider trying home-manager as the other reply mentioned, because it lets you stay in non-NixOS land until you get comfortable. I use my home-manage

You should consider trying home-manager as the other reply mentioned, because it lets you stay in non-NixOS land until you get comfortable. I use my home-manager config both on NixOS and on Ubuntu to not only to handle stereotypical dotfiles like Neovim and Tmux, but also things like setting dconf keys so that GNOME is instantly set up the way I want it on any new installs.