The docs for NixOS aren't good. Much knowledge is on many blogs but who knows them all?

Having the OS defined declaratively is great but I also dislike the Nix language.

Once it's setup NixOS is great. Sharing configs with PC and laptop is awesome. Rollbacks are baked in.

Going off the https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs helped me gettung started.

The syntax is just the outer layer, the whole concept inside it is alien. It's like a smartphone for a person who's only seen books.

It's almost a silver bullet. 300mb is pretty modest by today's standards, and nix supports both bare metal and docker containers, and everything in between

Seems to me we need to bridge that gap - make nix smarter and more compatible with docker, and we get a fully featured desktop/dev environment that can be packaged directly into the minimal reproducible deployment package

And that sounds like a silver bullet to me

Yeah, there is definitely a delineation between system and user, and like most things the line will be fuzzy.

But in that end-user software space, 300mb is a pittance to pay for a minor system package update not breaking their favorite application, or a user not being able to use software because their distro is one version behind on libfoo.

There's another aspect than size that I feel people overlook: security updates. When e.g. libcurl is duplicated in a million places, how do you update them all when a critical security issue is discovered in it? Who will update all the random flatpaks, snaps and docker images that happen to include it?