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I thought the same thing for a long time. The reality is that I knew nothing about NixOS other than the sales pitch the day I installed it: nothing about the language, nothing about flakes or derivations or whatever. By the afternoon I had most of my setup replicated. By the next day I had both desktop and laptop running identical configurations.

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When I got my MacBook I thought "hey it would be neat to install gcc and friends using Nix". I struggled through outdated documentation to add packages, mixed up editing the files and `nix-env --install`, struggled with the `nix search` command requiring flakes or something, and never did figure out how to even update my package versions. Earlier I also tried installing NixOS and never actually got any use out of the disk at all.

I’ll echo this sentiment. While it may take a while to figure out how to do something initially, the great thing about NixOS is that you only have to figure out how to do it exactly once. As far as my main desktop OS, I figured out a config that I liked several years ago, and haven’t really tweaked much since then. I ran the rolling release for a while, but I’ve moved back to the stable release, which is… well, stable.

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