Today, was a first day setting up a new computer. I spent most of the time installing applications and building up my setting with declarative configurations. This site has been helpful. I also started this walkthrough for setting up nix on a Mac.
I had to temporarily disable my nix.conf that was generated from the installer then run
nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes run nix-darwin -- switch --flake .
to run the flake.nix file.
I ended up uninstalling nix-darwin after there were several issues I encountered following the instructions on a brand new Mac (even though this article was written a month ago).
This beta vibe has continued to be my experience with Nix, though each time I return to it, I feel a get a bit more insight into what is happening and how it can be useful.
Unfortunately, the error messages are also difficult to troubleshoot with search engines or language models.