I tried guixos first, and that was really unpleasant. I'm still wary of trying nixos.

nix-env and the official docs caused me to give up on trying to figure out nix multiple times over the years.

Luckily someone recommended home-manager before I gave up last time, and things have started to make sense since then.

Same here.

Went straight from arch to nixos. Using nix-shell a lot for testing things or setting up dev environments.

I also don't use flakes or home-manager at the moment. I feel like just a regular configuration (split up in multiple .nix files) keeps everything very simple and works perfectly for me.