I use GNU stow for my dotfiles because I like it better than the way home manager does it (but I still use home manager for other things). Big piece of advice I’d give is to just remember, as you learn Nix stuff and get all excited about “reproducibility” and “declaring” things, that you don’t have to do everything the Nix way. You could very easily have a single configuration.nix file that mostly just specifies packages and then do nearly everything else the old-fashioned way. It’s your system and your comfort. (But for the record, I used arch-based systems for a long time as well, and though it took me about a week to figure out what I was doing in a NixOS VM, the satisfaction when I finally deployed to bare metal and everything just worked exactly as I intended it to was quite nice). And as others have said here, nixpkgs is massive and likely has all of what you need.