Does home manager work standalone without having nix first? I've never installed it on non-nixos
Nix shell is absolutely for running packages without installing them it literally tells you to do that in the terminal hint
Nix run iirc only works with flakes
No point imo, the people who benefit significantly from using Linux are the people who understand what it is
I try to get my techy friends on Linux and much of my family are techies anyway but I wouldn't try to put someone who won't be able to fix it themselves on it because then they're stuck if I'm not around to fix it