[jnsaff2]

While I agree with most of your comment and am writing this on my NixOS desktop, installing is a breeze only if you don't want to encrypt your root partition or don't want to use it on a macbook or something that mature OS'es usually do quite nicely out of the box.

I have my bookmarked set of gists to guide me through these things and it took me days to get it right the first time.

Also nixpkgs are a bit of a mess, you usually get a version of a package someone has bothered creating a PR for. This might be very old or bleeding edge. For specific versions you can be SoL. It is of course fairly easy to have your own .nix of the package and PR's are usually accepted quickly but the repo usually doesn't keep previous versions.

And then there is a whole world of pain regarding language specific packages. Python is especially painful for me.

It took me ages to find the page which hints at nix-shelling projects but this is a pita and requires a completely new workspace setup that is not compatible with people that don't use Nix.

Regardless I love NixOS, but to say this is perfect, not even close.