[rgoulter]

> it's also incredibly hard - I work with Linux day in and day out for work, and finding my way around Nix, configuring new packages / basic features, etc. just took too long for me.

Right.

In many ways, Nix is almost like a layer on top of Linux. If anything goes wrong, you'll need to understand both the Linux stuff, as well as how Nix works, and how Nix is making use of what's going on.

The most exciting thing I've seen with Nix recently is http://devenv.sh/ which offers both YAML/Nix declaration of a development environment.