[nextos]

Can you elaborate on what were the friction points? I migrated from Arch to Nix several years back because I found maintenance to be incredibly easy and it also allows me to test things without fear. Arch and other imperative distros are still superior for some workflows, but you can always run something imperative inside Nix like FHSEnv or DistroBox. Nix is also available in Arch extra, so it's also possible to do this the other way round, with Arch as a host.

[rkomorn]

For me (recent NixOS user), it's mainly two things:

- for every configuration item in the software I use, I basically need to learn the way to NixOS-configure it (assuming I don't want to raw-configure everything)

- experimentation is onerous (unless there are workflows I don't know), for example: messing with my sway config requires rebuild switches

I'm not bailing (yet?) but the "ergonomics", well, don't feel ergonomic.

[rkomorn]

Oh, and the NixOS / HomeManager split feels very funky, but NixOS life without HomeManager seems unreasonable for a daily driver laptop.

[nextos]

What parts of your workflow rely on HomeManager?

[rkomorn]

sway and waybar's configuration management is better through HomeManager (again: unless I basically raw-configure everything). Not quite sure where in nixpkgs swayidle configs would go, based on the sway module.

Some other user-levels get tossed in there by virtue of "since HomeManager's there, I may as well use it".

It seems that most wiki pages that I see that have both NixOS and HomeManager sections at the very least make HomeManager seem more featureful or flexible.

[nextos]

I've personally found a good compromise between using NixOS (without Home Manager) and classical dotfiles for home. My dotfiles are independent of the distribution, and also work in e.g. Arch.

[rkomorn]

I'm actually writing a script that takes my materialized NixOS-managed configs and backs them up in git so I can indeed port them to another distro if I decide to move away from NixOS (hedging my bets since NixOS is my 5th different OS/distro on this laptop).

Not having NixOS manage configs (itself or via HomeManager), though, very much reduces the value proposition of NixOS in my mind.