[dscottboggs]

Yeah. As someone trying to find the time to migrate back to Arch from NixOS... I understand how Arch drives you to want to make things bespoke and just so and reproduceable, but NixOS adds a ton of complexity and problems without ever really getting there.

[wasted_intel]

This doesn't mirror my experience at all. I think the biggest challenge facing NixOS is the learning curve. There's a lot thrown at you from the start, and as you start to factor your configuration into separate modules, there's a lot of complexity you have to unpack.

I've since migrated to a flake-based setup with machine-based variations (for my laptop and desktop), including easily swappable desktop environments. At a whim, I can switch between sway, hyprland, and gnome. This was mostly a result of me exploring/tweaking these without wanting to discard the configs; I always end up coming back to re-explore tiling WMs.

My experience through all of this has been great. I've even done a full re-install on both machines when the xz vulnerability was discovered and the process was effortless. That includes lanzaboote for SecureBoot, LUKS, and out-of-tree git-based flake builds for custom applications I build from source.

The one thing I found really helpful when starting with flakes was this repo that includes starter configs to help flatten that initial curve: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs/tree/main