Wow, I have never got that error but I haven't used nix-env much.
Yeah, to be honest familiarity with the NixOS module system doesn't hurt for home-manager. For me it was worth it but I was also just interested in Nix enough to read through the Nix-pills, etc.
Maybe given some time Nix will be polished enough that a smaller time investment will be enough.
Another thing: Yes, even if customizing your home-manager config could lead to hard to debug errors, once it works it is hard to brick and it will most likely work on new Laptops, colleagues machines, ...
That's why for my small at work my colleagues don't have to be as deep into Nix as I am but they can still benefit from the changes I am introducing in a pretty "safe" way.
All I want is a way to say "I want jq, kubectl, and terraform installed" and have it available globally. Not for specific projects or anything like that.
Right now I maintain a makefile that installs everything for me using `nix profile`:
https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L14-L2...
Which almost exactly like I want. Only issue is sometimes a new hash is generated (which I don't understand.. maybe a config update in the repos?) and the makefile can't run anymore:
I've avoided home-manager because it says: If its common enough to warn about it, not quite the tool I'm looking to pull into my environment.