Dan FarmerSomehow reading the documentation of nix home-manager got me thinking you need flakes, but now that I've done it (and so far am not liking it 😅 ) -- do y'all use flakes with home-manager or no? #nixos
Anthony Cowley@dfarmer I do!
Aaron Honeycutt | 🐧🚀🛰️@dfarmer I use it with flakes personally.
Pascal Dietrich
Jay 
@dfarmer I'm using flakes and have the home-manager flake pulled in through my flake.nix and then the nixos home-manager module itself added in my main configuration.
@jay thanks for the extra details. I did the stand-alone one and I'm thinking I want to switch to the module route.
Fargate 
@dfarmer Nope, I don't use flakes with anything.
YankeeDoodleAndy@dfarmer No flakes for me. I've been able to figure out a way to do everything I wanted so far. It took me too long to figure out how nice it is to add home-manager to _module.args and pass it to all the other modules, though.
nairou@dfarmer I started out with flakes, used it for about a year before deciding I didn't like it. Dumped flakes, and now use npins for pinning. Much better!
@nairou Yeah, it seems to have completely hosed my system. I can't seem to figure out how to get rid of flakes now; did you manage it or did you reinstall to get back?
@dfarmer I was able to transition from flakes to npins without a reinstall, but I did so cautiously. It's all just config files, so I made a copy and hacked that until it built again.
If your system is hosed, you'll probably want to revert back to a previous version of your config that builds properly. Then you can make changes from there to remove flakes in stages.
@dfarmer Ultimately, very little actually changes between flakes and npins. Both provide package pins, so the rest of the config just changes what source it's importing (flake.nix or npins/default.nix), and deleting a few flakes-specific settings.
If you're having specific problems removing flakes, I'd be happy to try to help. Just keep in mind you have to replace flakes with something, whether it be old-fashioned channels, npins, etc. Your installation needs to know where to get nixpkgs from.
@nairou I think I'll be able to figure it out. It seems somehow like it's the tool itself (it complains about flakes being disabled when I try to nixos-rebuild, but I generated a new config with nixos-generate-config so there is definitely no flake stuff present at all).
Vivekanandan KS 
(vivek)@vivekanandanks I had two issues with it: the switch to pure evaluation mode (trying to point the home-manager module to home.nix but /home paths not allowed) and for some reason it seemed switching to flakes resulted in a whole new set of packages that included a kernel that segfaults on boot up. It was my belief that it was just a wrapper that caused the problems 😄