[aidenn0]

I run Nix on my workstation and on my laptop, and have been doing so for a couple of years.

Most of the issues I ran into were just nix being different from other distros I use, so I did have to relearn a few things.

The remainder of the issues are the sorts of things one runs into with a non-rolling release distro. For example, a program I use got a feature I want last September. I'm going to have to wait until March for it to hit stable, since NixOS is on a September/March biannual release schedule.

The good news is that I am running the latest version of that package just fine now; Nix lets you install "overlays" of the package system into your home directory (or globally), and I just copied the package definition into the overlay, updated the URL and SHA256 sum to point to the new version and it "just worked."

Downside of course is when I upgrade to NixOS 21.03 (the march release), I'll have to remember to remove my overlay version of the package, or I'll be frozen on that version. There may be some fancy way to work around this which I haven't discovered, but since I have like 1 or 2 packages in that state at any time, I just manually do it when I upgrade.