This matches my experience with it so far. Extremely complicated and hard to understand, projects that use it have builds fail anyway except now with very hard to debug errors.
That is absolutely not true. If you start to get the hang of it and follow the way things are supposed to be done then things get easier over time. You need to invest upfront more time into your configuration but on the long run it pays off and saves you from an entire error class.
> projects that use it have builds fail anyway
The point of Nix/NixOS is not to have no failing builds but that those are reproducible and deterministic as much as possible and that those failures are noticed early and before the point of no return. A system build is supposed to fail early and not mid way through a major update and prompting you to merge some config under /etc by hand.
I think it would be more productive for you to sit down and give it a fair chance than posting little rebukes all over this thread.
Maybe it'll be job security if people start agreeing that downloading binary tools in in CI without a hash check is unacceptable attack surface, but until then it's just this weird thing I'm doing on the side.
I do catch a lot of bugs where people are relying on dependencies that they happen to have installed but have not declared. It's the kind of thing that prevents newcomers from being successful out of the gate, or makes taking a local process and putting it in CI difficult, but fixing those is not exactly high visibility.
With nix you can easily open a shell with the packages used in the docker image or go back in time and reproduce that image from a year ago with the flake.lock from a year ago.
Also applying patches to dependencies used in dockerfiles is not dead easy as with nix.
Also, let’s not lie to ourselves, there are plenty of ridiculous contraptions out there, like docker-images used for ML that take up some insane space, and are updated each day. Packaging is a hard problem, and there is finally a tool that can actually solve it.
You are very clearly describing that people have to work more to understand it. The person you're replying to even tried! Denying the experience of other people does not make that go away. It just means that the problem you're pretending doesn't exist will never get fixed.