Ehh, the reality is not quite that rose-tinted; in practice you have to put the elbow grease in, still. It's normally not quite as simple as porting someones co

Ehh, the reality is not quite that rose-tinted; in practice you have to put the elbow grease in, still. It's normally not quite as simple as porting someones config IME, because often it's wrapped up with other things they need. I've been a NixOS user and committer for 10 years. Things do in fact change and sometimes you have to learn a new thing, often. I'm dating myself here but I still remember when the Great Haskell Package overhaul happened, in an attempt to start vendoring Haskell packages directly from upstream Hackage; before that there was totally different infrastructure and every package was added manually. That broke a lot of things. Similarly, I only started using Flakes last year after years and years of development. Rust packaging is still pretty bad and non-granular, unless you use cargo-based generators which all have issues, and none are upstream. If you are using even more marginal languages, your experiences will probably range from bad to worse. NixOS is constant evolving and things do get deprecated and changed. You do have to learn new things. What you don't have to deal with as often is just, things randomly breaking. And with Flakes you don't have to deal with ambient Nixpkgs changes. I have shell scripts using nix-shell I haven't had to touch in years, despite incompatible changes in the tools used by the script. I still have a walled off NixOS machine running a 15.03pre-release, IIRC. I could probably upgrade it but the software on it isn't going to break. I suspect the disk will fail first (which is fine for this machine.) I think the best analogy is this: tools like Nix, Guix etc let you move mountains as an individual. That's impressive. It still requires you to get your hands dirty and actually push the thing, which is still work.