But you don’t get hardware graphics acceleration unless you use nixgl, and if you want to integrate it into home manager that breaks XDG entries, which I never figured out.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Also, you are illustrating the point of the commenter you replied to

Oh yeah, this is a part of my reply to the OP:

The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would've had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.