It’s definitely a rabbit hole and it took me a few tries to stick with it, but after getting off the ground I don’t think I could ever go back.

Here are some helpful resources for using NixOS:

This video helped me understand the basic setup of flakes and home manager, as well as general NixOS syntax.

This site from Nix lets you look up every package on the repository, and if you click options at the top you can also search through every option related to your system and packages as well.

If you decide to use home manager for declaring user packages and dotfiles, I have been using this site which is similar to the official Nix search but specifically for home manager stuff.

Hope it helps :)