I know this is a joke, and I get it, but:

Generally, the NixOS feature discovery/troubleshooting/documentation workflow should not involve Google.

It should start with a NixOS Options Search on search.nixos.org, where for most software projects the search will also end when you turn up a one-liner (or close to it) that enables your desired service or sets your desired configuration.

Then if you need to know more, check the NixOS manual and maybe the Nixpkgs manual.

If those things don't (quickly!) answer your question, then it's time to start Googling, checking the wiki, grepping through the Nixpkgs codebase, asking on Discourse or Matrix or IRC, etc.

Just wanted to note that here even though you were joking because that search order is a super simple way to make using NixOS a lot more enjoyable and less painful. Most NixOS users settle on a flow similar to that over time, but if you use that search order from the start, it'll help keep things fun. :)

I think this somewhat overstates it.

I'd put it more like: NixOS is 95% wonderful, 5% very painful.

Most of the things you'll want to do are simple to achieve.

But, yeah, if you hit something & you're not sure what to do: there's less support for NixOS than other Linuxes; and the NixOS documentation is quite fragmented. Community resources like the wiki or blog posts may even be outdated.

Well thank the benevolent lord that NixOS is the only OS you have to google stuff for. Good heavens, I could only imagine the horror of googling for a bug in Debian. A relief such a thing is nary even conceived of.

With NixOS, you may need three google searches to solve a problem, but once it's solved it's solved.

For my own use, it has been a net improvement over solving the same problems again and again on other distributions.

Also: most problems are solved by a single tool (writing nix expressions), so there's a real breakthrough once you get good at it.

c.f. Nix survey results from last year, which indicates many of the respondents use NixOS as their daily Linux distribution. (e.g. number of responses for just "uses gnome" and "uses plasma" are about half of the number of responses for "use NixOS daily"). https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983

Many of those who do use NixOS as a desktop Linux are enthusiastically happy about it.

Indeed, this user described the combination of nice features & rough edges as "cursed". (It's so good you won't want to use anything else, but it's too rough to recommend generally). https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/the-curse-of-nixos

I only recently discovered NixOS, and the first thing I did was install it on my workstation. I would say NixOS has a fantastic foundation/philosophy, with a lot of paper cuts, and relatively poor documentation. That being said, I don't see myself using anything else going forward, and hope to help address some of the pain points.

This comment threw me off hard because of how loaded it is.

1. How does that address the fact that NixOS is immutable?

2. If discussing server side applications was the intention of the author, why didn't they make that the explicit focus of the article? As the article currently stands, that's not the stated topic, but it is a point included in the article about why immutable OSes are cool. That's a noticeably different reality.

3. Even if we look past the above, NixOS can be used for server side deployment and in many cases is favourable to, say, Ansible deployments, so that STILL doesn't explain why it was left off!

There are definitely people who only use it on servers. Using NixOS on servers and Nix + macOS for the desktop/laptop is a somewhat common combo, too.

But NixOS is actually a very popular choice for desktop OS within the Nix community! That doesn't mean it's right for everyone, but it means that quite a lot of people who find Nix advantageous in other contexts also find it enjoyable or even indispensable for desktop usage.

When I still had an HTPC/living room gaming PC, it ran NixOS. It ran Kodi, a bunch of emulators with EmulationStation as the frontend, Steam, and a Plasma desktop (KWin's built-in fullscreen zoom + a good Steam Controller configuration is actually a great interface for full-fledged web browsing on a TV!) and served me very well for years.

It's the source of one of my favorite NixOS stories: one night my aunt was over to watch a movie with me, and I was running a NixOS system upgrade in the background while the movie played. It was a stormy night, and we had a brownout that forced the computer to reboot. Thanks to NixOS' atomic update procedure, the computer just booted right back up in a few seconds, and we put the movie back on! No need to troubleshoot or repair in order to get a working system. (I did later have to nuke some Nix cache which was corrupted by the process, but that affected only some of Nix's own operation and none of the application software or OS components that Nix managed on the system. Super cool!)

NixOS is a general purpose distribution. In the desktop use, it provides better management for the ad-hoc software dump that any personal machine inevitably becomes.

Lanzaboote implementation is currently functional, too.