I've used Nix for a decade and wouldn't recommend the confusing and horrible user experience of Nix without flakes.

Additionally, if you are using github for code examples, you'll have far more success using flakes.

Many experienced people a new user would get help from, including myself, have long since washed their hands of prw-flakes issues and arcana like channels issues.

That Flakes provide a consistent entrypoint (and a consistent schema for such) into a codebase would have deferred a significant amount of confusion I had when getting started with Nix.

> They're experimental

The functionality as-is hasn't been changed. The 'experimental' flag itself hasn't been a practical problem.

However, flakes still have some rough edges & design problems to them, and there's some disagreement in the community over how flakes were rolled out.

I'd say for an end user, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

> ... and you still need to learn most of flake-less Nix (except channels and NIX_PATH) anyways.

I think the phrase "flake-less Nix" paints the wrong idea. I'd instead put it: Most of what you need to learn about Nix is unrelated whether the Nix evaluation started from a Flake or not.