The Nix language itself is the hardest part.

Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just : (e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.

The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a services.foobar.enable = true and sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing that https://search.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.

There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.

I really feel compelled to share that I actually really fucking love nix. I've never felt so confident that my computer would turn on no problem. It was hard and it was rewarding.

Idk I guess I haven't had it for long but once I got my dotfiles the way I like I just stopped messing with it.

Also nix devshells are pretty dope (⁠◕⁠ᴗ⁠◕⁠✿⁠)

If you download a binary you can just steam-run it and it just works

It's missing the fact that the nix store can be huge, even if garbage collected regularly. This prevents me from using nix on my Ubuntu laptop with limited HDD space.

NixOS sounds like ansible in OS form and that has never seemed appealing. Happy to hear why my impression is wrong though!

I've been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn't break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn't force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it's just... kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.

Guess what happened... I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks...

• I really really really like the declarative stuff. Installing packages through config files is so nice I'll never lose track of what I've installed ever again 🥰 🥰 🥰 I was already using a git repo for all my config files + GNU Stow to symlink everything to its proper place, so adding the .nix configs to that setup was very easy.
• Having a clean system on rebuild is great. No more clutter left everywhere that I don't know about, no more half broken stuff left lying around.

But...

• It's not Arch. Not Nix's fault, but I kept hearing that it would be "like Arch but declarative"... and it's really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible.
• I absolutely hate the language.
• What's with those error messages from hell???
• And speaking of hell, every language that can't just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
• Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it's unfair since it's not trying to be a rolling release... but... but...)
• Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant... 😭
• Nix packages are weird. Even someone who's terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS... I miss you Arch 😢
• Apps not working because of paths that don't exist on Nix... what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there's steam-run, great preserver of what's left of my sanity.
• Can't wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don't bother just do it imperatively 😑 )
• Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don't already know what you are doing (and I clearly don't 😅)
• Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven't installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it's already configured is not in the default config files. It's very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it's configured by default.

But it's kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.

Skipped to the "ugly" part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?

I think a bigger problem is that it's hard to find "best practices" because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.

Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it's a struggle when it comes to doing things like "how do I change the source of a package", "how do I compose two modules together" and "how do I add a repo to a flake so it's visible in my config". Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they're taking about.

I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.