I agree there’s a lot of hacks and maybe the current model of Nix as it is today won’t survive. However, I think several aspects of the Nix concept are highly

I agree there’s a lot of hacks and maybe the current model of Nix as it is today won’t survive. However, I think several aspects of the Nix concept are highly novel and worth pursuing, and there’s no way to get there without large intermediary steps. NixOS and GuixSD represent, to me, some of the most exciting OS research not aimed squarely at security. It’s difficult to fully appreciate until you’ve really exploited it well. The hacks that are needed today, indeed, are a bit of a turn off, but I do still find a remarkable amount of stuff ends up working well in the model. As a personal example, NixOS not managing dotfiles feels like it would be a huge deal, but actually it isn’t as big of a deal because you can just manage system level configs; for example, my SwayWM config is stored at /etc/sway/config and so forth, and I can neatly provide Nix store paths in my config files through substitution, allowing me to keep my global namespace cleaner. (Various approaches for per user config can then be applied as needed, such as referencing global configs from dotfiles, or wrapper scripts that have logic.) My opinion is that it’s unlikely NixOS or Nix are the stable, hermetic utopia we’re looking for, but they or a successor may very well become it, and the exploration done today is an important part of the necessary research. I’m already excited by things you can do today that are not well documented, like cross compiling to other platforms almost seamlessly (for example, MinGW has worked quite well in my experience.)