[pxc]

To supplement and illustrate your claim about NixOS being easy to package for, I'd like to share an example:

I've been using NixOS more or less exclusively for ~2.5 years now. Whenever I want to run software on NixOS which is not already in Nixpkgs, I package it (if I want it bad enough). This week, for example, I packaged KSmoothDock so that I could try it out.

This is the whole thing:

    { mkDerivation, lib, fetchFromGitHub
    , cmake, extra-cmake-modules
    , plasma-framework, kwindowsystem }:

    let
      version = "5.9";
    in

    mkDerivation {
      name = "ksmoothdock-${version}";
      src = (fetchFromGitHub {
        owner = "dangvd";
        repo = "ksmoothdock";
        rev = "v${version}";
        sha256 = "1fbghyd079xk4q5na8msna5zkfg85c4ksyfqy524v2pm96dyl2dr";
      } + "/src");

      nativeBuildInputs = [
        cmake
        extra-cmake-modules
      ];

      buildInputs = [
        plasma-framework
        kwindowsystem
      ];

      postPatch = ''
        substituteInPlace CMakeLists.txt \
          --replace /usr/share/ share/
      '';

    }

It didn't feel like much work and I think it only took a few minutes. In this case, I was able to base the package definition on another 3rd-party dock for Plasma, so it was even easier than usual to get started. I just copied the other package and changed the package name and location of the source code, and everything worked. I then cleaned up by consulting the README for the project and removing as many extraneous dependencies as possible, and smoothed over a quirk, which was pretty painless.

Once you get a feel for the docs (and the Nixpkgs source, just because it's a treasure trove of examples), packaging for/with Nixpkgs is usually pretty easy, and the results pretty readable.

I should also add that the range of packages already included also seems to me to have improved a great deal over the years that I've been using NixOS. And I think once NixOS gains support for Snap packages and Flatpaks (the latter is in the works and has been making good progress recently), it will become a much more viable desktop OS for those unwilling or unable to deal with packaging the odd missing application.