[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

Same here, tried NixOS for ~3 months, I tried to go all-in too, I spend time to really read the docs and work out an intricate configuration that leverages features like flakes and covers my system setup and dotfiles (got inspired by Lissners NixOS configuration) and was ready to handle multiple systems in preparation to roll it out to my 2nd and 3rd machine.

Ultimately there were warts that I was able to solve, but still annoyed me greatly and felt ugly and forced me to step outside the convience of my nixos config system (like wifi with iwd, btrfs + swap files) and at one point I was no longer able to `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade`, the command kept failing even on versions of my config that I was able to confirm working, I spent some time trying to find the problem but eventually came to the conclusion that it might not be worth it in the long run.

In the end I went back to my previous distribution of choice. I still find the whole concept interesting and I will give Guix a try next.

Fixing NixOS problems that the community hasn't encountered or solved yet really fills me with a special kind of dread compared to regular distributions where finding a solution to a rare problem is usually just a mix of taking a look at upstream and writing a patch or adapting general solutions from other distributions.

[ris]

I honestly think that Nix is one of those things where "going all in" is one of the worst things you can do. Running a desktop system on NixOS is quite a tricky prospect for someone with no experience of Nix and you'll likely get frustrated with having to learn some potentially alien concepts to achieve simple things.

I tend to recommend people start in the shallow end, using Nix on a regular Linux distribution (or even macos) for a while. Use it to manage development environments and for ephemerally accessing tools as you need them.

For me, the place that NixOS itself really shines is on servers.

[mst]

Being able to spin up an entire network of qemu+kvm VMs easily to do proper integration testing of my system configs was a revelation.

[trexd]

I found that building my configuration on a virtual machine was the best way to go. This way I was not desperate to get things working and simply moved when I felt like all my essential programs were in place.