How does the number of packages in nixos compare to, say, arch's aur? Looking around, I see a decent selection, but I figured I would get more feedback from the community.
According to repology.org, NixOS outnumbers any other distros in terms of up-to-date packages[1]. And the best part is, each and every one of these packages in NixOS goes through proper review.
I personally don't find any major annoyances with NixOS so far, but a lot of people do complain about the Nix language being a high barrier to entry though. However, once you grasp the basics, it makes it really easy to create your own custom packages for your favorite software thanks to the rich facilities built on top of the Nix language that just doesn't match any other system packaging tools.
Packages are tend to be old. That's the downside of using nix over other package managers.
Stuff like filebeat from ELK stack is like a year old version.
Some are of course up to date but for less popular ones, you would look elsewhere to install.
To bad because I like how I can install things the same for macOS and Linux, unlike Homebrew whicu gets installed in some weird /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/ dir and shell config needs to be changed.
I personally don't find any major annoyances with NixOS so far, but a lot of people do complain about the Nix language being a high barrier to entry though. However, once you grasp the basics, it makes it really easy to create your own custom packages for your favorite software thanks to the rich facilities built on top of the Nix language that just doesn't match any other system packaging tools.
[1]: https://repology.org/graph/map_repo_size_fresh.svg