Tangentially related but I wish people would stop recommending nix-env and just in general ad-hoc installation on using Nix. It defeats the purpose of using Nix in the first place. If you want to try a package out, there’s "nix shell" or "nix-shell -p" if you’re not using flakes. If you want to install a package you should put it in your configuration instead.
I have all of my config in a flake, but I think both are fine. Not everyone will use Nix the same way. And it’s easy to see a progression path from using Nix with package installation from nix-env, to flakes, to NixOS. Some people might stop along that journey, but Nix might not have been a good fit for their usecase then anyways. It’s already way too hard to break into the ecosystem, no reason to make it harder.
