[akavel]

Hm, I didn't intend to convey a message that "Nix is more horrifying than Arch". For me, it's actually the other way round. Never tried Arch; but at some point in the past tried Gentoo for a few seconds, as well as Slackware; compared to those, in NixOS I just feel this huge safety net, with which however* deep I'll dig, I won't be punished for that. And truth said, even in Ubuntu I have to hack the OS occasionally, so in some way NixOS feels safer than Ubuntu.

* -- again, standard disclaimer, any Linux distro can kill your puppy, eat your homework, and burn your laptop; but that's true even of Ubuntu :)

Not sure how to rephrase the original post to better express what I mean. That said, after reading your reply, I agree that I find it hard to push on NixOS to even fellow "regular" devs; I don't have balls yet to install it as my main OS either. Maybe it's that NixOS has somewhat harder initial curve than "your common Linux"; the install phase reminded me somewhat of Slackware of '90s for a sec (though it's still better); again, not sure how it compares to Arch; plus there's the new language (Nix). That said, personally I wouldn't even think about using Arch, knowing how even tweaking Ubuntu is risky. And exactly as you said, I found Nix (the language) truly cute quite quickly. Totally much simpler than Haskell (which I still can't break into, even after some initial successes with SML, OCaml, and growing interest in Idris, which is reportedly Haskell-inspired).