[everforward]

I was at a company in the midst of the migration, so beware that my experience reflects a messy stage rather than an end state. I left before it was declared done, but we were using it.

My impression was fairly painful. I spent weeks troubleshooting small issues just trying to get it set up. The root issue ended up being something with how I configured it's repo of recipes/flakes/can't remember the term. The error messages weren't super helpful, and Nix doesn't seem to have enough penetration that even dumb errors caused by misconfiguration are googleable.

Given that most of our apps were distributed via tarballs or git clones prior to this (meaning no complex dependencies between them), I was more inclined to use something more similar to that (namely yum, apt or dnf). Having to re-do our builds and deployments at the same time was fairly painful.

Lastly, I don't feel like we really reaped any rewards. Tarballs forbid us from establishing complicated dependencies, so a lot of the pain points that Nix fixes just didn't apply. The things that Nix makes more painful were definitely felt, though.

Overall, it's something I might try if I were somewhere greenfield. I still think I would lean towards a traditional package manager or containers, though. Nix introduced a lot of friction for me, and it feels unlikely that the issues Nix solves would cost me more time than the constant friction of Nix.