[imiric]

Agreed. I've been using NixOS on several machines for a few years now, and it has never "clicked" for me either. It's not that the learning curve is steep; it's that the ecosystem is actively hostile to the user, with confusing failures and error messages, poor/missing/outdated documentation, alien syntax and concepts unique to Nix, etc. Maybe all of this makes perfect sense to the creators of the project, and to hardcore users that dedicate a lot of time to it, but, frankly, I don't have that kind of patience.

So recently I decided to give up on it and look into Guix instead more seriously. I played around with it a bit when the project was young, but it was barely usable back then. I'm hoping that it has matured enough to be usable for everyday computing, since it's now relatively simple to install non-GNU-approved packages. It borrows many concepts from Nix (including home management), and Guile at least seems like a sensible language with solid fundamentals.

I do think that the concepts Nix pioneered will eventually trickle down to mainstream distros and other operating systems. They're too powerful to ignore. But Nix itself will not be the tool that drives this adoption.