I recently tried NixOS 24.11 but quickly decided it’s not for me or something I’d recommend. While the system initially seemed promising, it was frustrating in practice.

My first hurdle was configuring the network in configuration.nix. The installed template implies network settings go there, but that’s misleading. Worse, "nixos-rebuild switch" requires a working network, so a broken config leaves the system unable to fix itself – a catch-22.

Next, I tried "nix search wget", as suggested in the manual, but hit errors about missing experimental features. I had to enable both nix-command and flakes manually to get this to work:

    nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes search nixpkgs wget

Even then, package search, like configuration, seems to depend on a network connection, which feels unnecessarily fragile.

(edit: formatting)