yeah, the "entry-level" documentation is definitely one of the weak points of the Nix ecosystem. I'd compare it to trying to learn how to do oil changes on your car and only finding "car guy" web forums full of posts about transmission rebuilds and 3D printing your own carburetors.
my recommendation (as I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm a 10+ year NixOS user) would be to install NixOS on a VM or spare laptop and tinker with configuring it. you can follow the breadcrumbs, for example enabling sshd [0] has a "declared in" link to [1] where you can read the Nix source code of what that NixOS option actually does on your system.
flakes, modules, and overlays are all relatively "advanced" parts of the ecosystem, you don't need to know them as a new user. in particular, you will find many blog posts telling you to use flakes right from the beginning. that's an option, but not at all required.
my recommendation (as I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm a 10+ year NixOS user) would be to install NixOS on a VM or spare laptop and tinker with configuring it. you can follow the breadcrumbs, for example enabling sshd [0] has a "declared in" link to [1] where you can read the Nix source code of what that NixOS option actually does on your system.
flakes, modules, and overlays are all relatively "advanced" parts of the ecosystem, you don't need to know them as a new user. in particular, you will find many blog posts telling you to use flakes right from the beginning. that's an option, but not at all required.
0: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.11&show=services...
1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modu...