> Nix certainly has a steep curve, but simple things are not that hard. I got committed to migrate to Nix one Monday. I spent the whole morning reading about it

> Nix certainly has a steep curve, but simple things are not that hard. I got committed to migrate to Nix one Monday. I spent the whole morning reading about it. In the afternoon, my workstation was already up and running. On the same evening, I packaged two exotic things I need which weren't on NixPkgs. Next day, I fixed my favorite window manager, which was broken on NixPkgs. I maintain all these on NixPkgs now. I mean... it's great that you did all that, but you do realize that going that far makes you a power user, right? Most users are going to give up if they can't figure out how to install their window manager or other essential software (eg installing Docker or Steam is ridiculously hard if you don't know that they have special hard-coded config values; it's almost like a game you can only beat if you find the cheat codes). > With that said, declarative stuff is poised to be harder for non-trivial stuff. Just like Haskell is harder than C, NixOS is harder than ArchLinux or Alpine. I still very much find it worth the effort for simple workflows. I can now update remote machines without fearing breakdowns and state is very explicit. Hard disagree. I could totally see a world where NixOS is as easy to install as any other distribution. But the developers are going to have to put a lot of work into smoothing out wrinkles before it gets there.