Does anyone have a good resource for a quickstart/high-level overview of just the terminology required to understand Nix? Flakes/overlays/nixpkgs/etc. I start wading in to try and understand it, and instead run into arguments and disagreements.

Unfortunately, without a base level understanding of the entire ecosystem, I stay lost.

I started playing with nix few months ago. Youtube videos from Vimjoyer helped a lot. On top of that Claude Code is very good at understanding/explaining/updating config.

Regarding features: so far for my home setup (few vms on proxmox) I only needed flakes. They age good at organizing multihost config.

But besides it it works smoothly. And I constantly have thought “wait, why we didn’t always do it this way?”

Level 1 is using nix to install packages, which you can do by writing a flake like.

The arguments probably come from the fact that flakes are 'experimental', but de facto widely used.