I've been putting off learning Nix until Flakes become stable. They've come up several times as I've researched various things I would want to do with Nix, and I think waiting a little longer is right for me. I'd be interested to hear what others think about this?
I think there's low-hanging fruit in terms of what you can benefit from with Nix without having to learn too much. (Albeit, learning Nix enough to be comfortable using it for what you want may take time). -- I'd encourage giving it a try anyway.
The biggest negative difference I've felt is that the 'nix classic' way of imperatively installing a package to a profile (`nix-env -iA nixpkgs.<name>`) isn't forward-compatible with the 'nix command' equivalent(`nix profile install nixpkgs#<name>`). And the latter is only compatible with flakes. So, you can use `nix-env`, until you use `nix profile`. -- nix-env/nix profile 'discouraged' because they're prone to problems from "I forgot I did that" / "I didn't know I did that".. but, still. (e.g. home-manager uses nix-env under the hood).
