[gaganyaan]

I'd say it's really about the documentation, including "unofficial" documentation like bug reports and SO questions. Part of why Ubuntu is so popular is because there's enough of a community that whatever issue you hit, someone's probably already hit it before and asked about it on SO, where it has a highly upvoted answer that fixes the issue and explains it. That's also why NixOS seemed like a better choice than Guix to me.

One thing I ran into was setting up a Python project using poetry2nix. Mostly works great, but then you sometimes get inscrutable error messages. I had to copy this into a shell.nix file for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me (and I had to hunt it down from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs myself instead of finding docs or a bug report):

    astunparse = super.astunparse.overridePythonAttrs
            (old: { buildInputs = old.buildInputs ++ [ self.wheel ]; });

One non-documentation issue I've hit is that even when using the stable channel, you live much closer to the bleeding edge than a distro like Ubuntu. I updated my system to the latest packages, and then my wifi wouldn't work after waking up from sleep. Turned out to be a kernel regression that was fixed a few days later in a patch update. Everything was fine again, but it's not something you'd run into with a more conservative distro. Similar issue with the latest Gnome breaking extensions for a while before they got updated.