NixOS Server Up in Minutes

For me there are two:

- the nix language, very little digestible

- a somewhat disperse community

But it's still pretty usable and EXTREMELY better than mainstream distros automated with Ansible. The real issue is that most people still do not know such systems (NixOS/Guix System) do exists and they are arguably the future.

The biggest issues are the learning curve (long-standing) and some growing social fractures in the community (boiled over more recently)

Random blogging has been complaining about imperative approach to management for a long time as well. There's a lot of nuance in different cases, but both have their bad/good sides. Having used both a lot, I'm using nix on everything these days though. You'll have to try and experience them yourself.

My main pain point is random bash scripts you find on the internet no longer work reliably without modification. It feels like 99% of the bash scripts in the wild reference #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/bash neither of which exist on NixOS. Similar story with downloaded binaries. There are plenty of workarounds. But it gets annoying. I find it works really well for servers where random downloads are less likely, but I ran into this constantly running as a workstation. steam-run will become your crutch.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Packaging/Binaries

it's fully supported, my main desktop is NixOS on zfs crypto root. I do not use auto-snapshots but they are supported as well.