I didn’t stay long with the traditional setup since Flakes are a lot better imo. Personally I’d recommend it, especially to replace channels in the traditional NixOS setup which are not designed well since they break reproducibility.

Also, if you do want to look through my configurations, I just added a small readme to my repository, it’s under the about tab. Large configurations like this can be intimidating from my experience starting out so I hope it helps a bit :^)

I think that despite the fact that they’re not officially stable, flakes are not going away. So yes it does make sense to learn flakes, but there’s nothing wrong with learning it along the classic way, they have a lot in common.

I used normal channels for a year before switching to flakes, and either way is fine when you’re learning, especially since NixOS is already pretty tricky. Once you figure it out though you should switch to flakes sometime.

I think Flakes are quite useful and, although they might be somewhat challenging to wrap your head around, isn’t really all too hard to actually set up once you have your configuration.nix and hardware-configuration.nix. Here’s the video tutorial that got me started on my Flakes journey, and here’s a really good set of dotfiles to use as an example for when you want to start modularising your configurations. So to answer your question, I think you should, yes.