Nix: Potential with Challenges

I've seen a lot of chatter about Nix for a while now but haven't had a need to investigate. I recently found myself revisiting it and I think it has promise but I also encountered some immediate challenges:

Steep learning curve

Viktor Farcic explains it best:

"Nix is amazing but also very difficult to manage. [It] assumes that you learn its programming language and that you're willing to ignore frustration generated by horrible documentation. I think it is one of the most useful projects out there that cannot be used by anyone but those willing to dedicate their lives to Nix. ... The way I see it, Nix is like a cult - those who managed to pass the initiation joined its ranks swear by it while the rest of the world finds it just not worth the trouble and sticks with their own religion. Hence we have a problem: we have a very useful project -- one of the most interesting ones I've seen in a while -- yet it has a very high barrier to entry. I see two ways to reconcile: one would be for Nix to rewrite its programming language to write documentation that is actually useful to mere mortals and stop being a cult; another solution is for Nix to be a project that powers other solutions."

Community drama

Tvix, Lix, Determinate, ... drama, drama, drama :(

Just listing installed packages is hard

https://stackoverflow.com/a/47957142

Complicated dependency management

As they say, an image is worth a thousand words (courtesy of Shopify):

No clear winner for deployment manager

Lots of tools exist but a clear winner remains elusive with NixOps going into low maintenance mode.

ARM support is spotty

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM

Love-Hate relationship

Many users describe hating NixOS but also unable to leave it..

Weird language syntax

Why use a common option when you can roll your own...

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All that said, Nix does appear to have promise (especially with abstraction/helper tools like Devbox and Flox) so keep your eye on it...