[nextos]

I maintain several Nix packages, and I agree that for some edge cases it can be a pain.

Another annoying thing is that NixPkgs has developed some technical debt, with some packages being perennially broken. Guix is smaller, but much cleaner in this regard. Julia can't be used in Nix, and many Bioconductor packages are broken.

However, I feel like the existence of FHSUserenvs needs to be better advertised and documented. These give you the ability to easily install unpatched software that assumes a regular (FHS) Unix filesystem layout (/bin, /lib...).

Still, I think the benefits of using Nix and NixOS surpass the drawbacks right now. I use Nix in dozens of machines. It is, along with Arch, my favorite distribution. Both sit at two local maxima of the design space. Declarative-functional and imperative with a minimal layer of tooling.

[bamboozled]

If you had to go with one or the other, which would it be? I'm on the fence now, I have one machine with Arch, my heavy development machine with NixOS. I'm considering ditching NixOS altogether.

I just miss using the same tooling as everyone else in my team without issues or having to constnatly spawn up a new nixenv everytime I change folders. Maybe using FHSuserenvs will help?

I've never really been able to grasp the language, I don't care what anyone says, the documentation is terrible. Every time I try build a package it always takes me days to workout how to do it.

Really feeling that while, yeah, it's nice to have everything in one configuration file, it's good, but when something breaks, I have really no idea how to fix it.