NixOS is not an obvious choice if you want to become a "Linux super-user." It takes a very unconventional approach to package management, building and configuring your system. All great for what it is but not going to teach you the conventional Linux way of doing things.
I don't know if this is still the case but when installing Arch, it used to be that you would start with a very basic set of essential packages and then build everything up from scratch. That is a great way to become a power user. However I thought the whole point of Manjaro was that it's an Arch variant which does a bunch of that for you, so Manjaro's a weird choice for this guide.
Yeah, NixOS really benefits from you understanding what it's changing.
Last year I wanted to make flatpak use a different partition. Some searches (and reading the docs) later, I decided to use /etc/flatpak/installations.d/ to add an extra location. I set up environment.etc to create the file, but flatpak ignored me. After some futzing around I eventually ran strace and realised that it was searching the nix store, and not /etc. So I wrote an overlay to have it create the file during build so it existed in the store.
Being able to recognize that NixOS may be looking at an unconventional location was what allowed me to make that work.
Most successful NixOS users— that is, people who enjoy running it!— tend to have a decent background with the usual GNU/Linux userland before they start.
I don't think it has to be this way forever, but it would take a special type of guide to help someone navigate learning the GNU/Linux userland and NixOS' take on it at the same time and we don't really have that.
Yeah to me NixOS doesn't even really feel like a 'Linux distribution'. It's just a totally different sort of experience. A cool one, but if someone had only ever used NixOS I think they'd struggle as much with a normal distro as someone that's only ever run a normal distro would struggle with NixOS.
I don't know if this is still the case but when installing Arch, it used to be that you would start with a very basic set of essential packages and then build everything up from scratch. That is a great way to become a power user. However I thought the whole point of Manjaro was that it's an Arch variant which does a bunch of that for you, so Manjaro's a weird choice for this guide.
Edit: Looks like doing a vanilla Arch install is still pretty gangsta: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide#Install_...