I think this is quite a fair commentry (although I quite like the Nix language personally) - as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop. For me it shines on servers and development environments.
that's not every encouraging :)
I've never even really tried NixOS on the desktop TBH.
It’s like doubting Kubernetes because one of the maintainers doesn’t run their desktop in KubeVirt.
It is all those things, but specifically, what you want it to be. Yes, that makes it super confusing, but also powerful.
I absolutely believe you’ve had this problem, but I’m struggling to understand the issue you’re describing. How exactly is an apt install breaking your whole system? I don’t even really understand how an apt install could break an entire system rather than just failing to install the package. Did you mean to say dist-upgrade or something? Are you using Debian or a downstream distribution? If Debian, are you running Sid or is this happening on unstable/stable? I’m just really curious about this situation.
NixOS gave me back my desire to customise my Linux again. I’ve run Linux since 1997; I’ve run a lot of distros.
Having to reconfigure my Linux on every hardware reset (1-2 years apart) just exhausted me to a point where I ran GNOME on Ubuntu so I wouldn’t waste time on one-off stuff.
My .emacs and .vimrc shrunk to 10% so I could reproduce them from memory if I had to.
With NixOS, installing a new machine and having it work exactly like all my machines is minutes of work.
I’ll never lose my hyper-customised setup again.
Running something like Arch or Artix again feels very much like losing my “save” button.
That said there are prolific and longstanding contributors who focus on non-NixOS and even non-Linux platforms, and corporate users are likely to be running Nix on macOS or Ubuntu (under WSL). It's not surprising that some users who don't use NixOS on laptops or desktops have still become Nixpkgs contributors or maintainers, imo.
1. I use Nix primarily on the desktop (2 laptops, 2 workstations), though I also use it on one server. I don't think I could ever go back to any other Linux distro for my daily-driver. Things "just work" to a degree that they never have for me on e.g. Ubuntu.
2. I quite despise the Nix language; this is not to say that I think it's particularly bad (or good) as a language, just that nearly every single degree-of-freedom in language design that is largely about personal taste takes the opposite choice to what I would prefer
3. I find setting up development environments with it to be very hit-or-miss, to the point where I have in some cases fallen back on what I would do without nix, and used nix-ld to fill in the gaps.