nix-1p VS aconfmgr

Fair enough. I've also had a couple of programs which weren't packaged already, fortunately it's quite easy to do so most of the time (or to just fall back to a distrobox container or flatpak in the worst case). If you decide to try it out, nix-1p and Nix Pills were great resources for me to get familiar with Nix and NixOS in a short time-span.

Wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve for the language itself, it's pretty easy to get a grasp around it imo. Here's a helpful page I used to quickly get familiar with the language: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

What's rather messy about Nix is nixpkgs with its helper functions all over the place alongside pretty shallow / non-existent documentation (which is unrelated to the language). Thankfully they've started to work on that recently: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-...

I wrote a language tutorial for only the language a while back, and have gotten the feedback that it has helped a lot of people - maybe it'd clear something up for you: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

For Nix language things I really like this page: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

Establishing a backup strategy. I'm using BTRFS with snapper and a pacman hook that creates a new snapshot before each upgrade. With ext4 I used timeshift. Besides that, I save my arch configuration with aconfmgr and my files with borg

Since my last cloning I've setup aconfmgr and and systemd-homed. I've also been playing around with archinstall configs to partition the system with encryption how I like. In the future I'm planning to use archinstall and aconfmgr to setup a new system for me and then I'll copy over the backup of my home directory.

try this https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

Have you tried aconfmgr? In addition to installing packages, it also tracks configurations in /etc and modified files.

For my backup I keep files in my home directory synced with my NAS via syncthing. For my system backup I don't actually backup up my system, I configure my system via aconfmgr and that config is stored in my home directory and synced to my NAS. Using aconfmgr to "backup" my system is extremely space effecient, my aconfmgr config is only 1.7 MB.

aconfmgr (in AUR) can be used to save and restore system configurations and installed packages. For user configuration you can use a dotfile manager like chezmoi (in repo).

I know you prefer backing up manually, but aconfmgr might be for you.

To get something closer to nix on arch I like to use aconfmgr.

For those who are not familiar with Arch's aconfmgr, well I have not used it before but just saw it in a post. But it seems to be a configuration manager for Arch. It tracks, manages, and restores your Arch Linux OS configuration.