i use arch (btw), and i hate how much i depend on the AUR, its very unstable. I switched to flatpak for my gui programs since the cli experience sucks. nix on the other hand works like a native package manager, and thats great for me. but i see that nix also includes stuff like coreutils (because of nixos im guessing). do i install everything with nix? if not what packages do i install with pacman and which with nix?
Whatever you want? / It probably doesn’t matter. / If it’s not causing pain why mess with it?
When using nix on non-nixOS, it may be tricky to get the OS to use the nix-managed packages for core system / early boot stuff like linux (the kernel), systemd, agetty, xdm, etc., but usually there’s no need to. Nix packages bring all their needed dependencies, so even if nixpkgs is using a newer libc or something that’s not compatible with the system libc, things will still mostly* Just Work because the nix-built packages know exactly where to look for the nix-managed libc they were built with.
(* Notable exception: OpenGL drivers, which for reasons are selected at runtime rather than build-time. See issue 31189 for some history.)