Personally, I feel that over time this becomes less of a problem. It was very annoying for me as well, but as you get used to the language and the ecosystem, you get better at it and you will need less rebuilds to incorporate something into your config. And if it’s only every couple of days, then I am completely fine with waiting 10-30 seconds for the rebuild.

If I’m trying to brute-force my way through something I usually continue to look for the next possible solution while the system is rebuilding, so it doesn’t feel like time-loss to me.

Also using something like that takes all the fun out of configuring it yourself.

No, I don’t configure using nix, but partially because I don’t use home-manager. So I just write in the native config language.

The other reason is that I don’t believe configuring everything in nix is sustainable. You’re adding another layer that needs to be maintained by someone, and there isn’t much benefit. The native config is as much part of my configuration as a pure nix configuration would be.

And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s dedicated files or just inline in a nix module. I decide based on complexity. My neovim config is spread out over many files, but all other configs are inline.

My goal is to cross-compile from nix to windows. I need to have this program running on windows (or at least provide binaries for it haha), but I really don’t want to dual-boot again (I just got rid of windows a couple of months ago, and I’m not too keen on looking at it again in the near future). Maybe I phrased my question the wrong way.

So I don’t need the environment to run on windows, it just needs to be able to compile for windows.

Yeah, NixOS is definitely a journey. For me personally, a very fun one. You’re kinda experiencing what is was like experiencing linux for the first time. Took me like half a year to get proficient with nix in a way I was productive with it.

That configuring some programs is completely different from how it should be is a weird quirk of home-manager. I personally don’t use it, it adds a lot of complexity for not much benefit.

But for me, nix saved me in terms of linux. I‘m someone who frequently switches around devices or just completely wipes their existing ones (I‘m very messy with file management, and I just need a clean install after a year or two). It was incredibly annoying to use other distros, especially if you are tinkering a lot it can occasionally happen that you brick your install. You kinda had to document all the fixes for certain issues so that you didn‘t forget them. I could think of more things. That’s just specific to me, but Nix solves all those problems. Not sure I‘d be using linux if it wasn’t for NixOS.