[nvarsj]

NixOS and the nix package manager are revolutionary OS tools, hampered by a convoluted, undocumented language and library (itself called Nix).

Despite this, I think it's totally worth going through the pain of learning Nix to use NixOS. There is nothing else like it. I imagine other OS's will try to copy and borrow the ideas, in fact they are already doing this (see all the half baked immutable OS stuff out there...), but nothing is as good as NixOS at the moment.

Note: A notable exception is GNU Guix, which is another excellent OS/package manager that is very similar to Nix, with the far more approachable Guile (scheme based). Unfortunately the ecosystem is just not large enough to be usable for practical purposes - also it's hampered by the usual aversion to non-free software.