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Comment by chpatrick | Hacker News Reader

I had the opposite experience. I started using it as a daily driver around 10 years ago and could never to back to anything else. It's just super solid and once you have it configured it just works forever. I agree that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially if you want to use something that's not in nixpkgs but those things are vanishing day by day.

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Yeah, for all the blog posts about quitting NixOS there's plenty of us who continue using it.

I don't think it's just the steep learning curve though, I think it's just not for everyone. You _have_ to enjoy side quests where you dive deep into hairy problems, and effectively be willing to front load effort into setting up an environment so that it works well for you in the long term.

I think OP sums it up pretty well. If there isn't an existing module or one that does exactly what you want, your only way forward is to program your way out of it. That's just not something I want from my daily driver of a distribution. It doesn't help that this programming happens in a weird (to me) functional language.

> That's just not something I want from my daily driver of a distribution.

And that's fine! People are different, there's no way one OS is the best choice for everyone. :)

I think that's fair. The stuff that works for other distros won't work for Nix. However I think eventually everything will be nix-ified. Right now for services there's also an easy escape hatch with docker and oci-containers. It's also what I use if I can't be bothered to nixify some server I want to run.

I think it's weird to most people. I've used NixOS on my personal machines for 2 years and Nix lang is easily the worst thing about it. I'm definitely not a huge functional guy but I'm familiar with Lisp/Scheme and F#. Nix feels completely foreign in a way that those languages didn't.

There have definitely been situations where I've just decided to not try out an application because it wasn't in nixpkgs (it's pretty rare for a package to not exist but one prominent example is Zen browser).

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