I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn't offer "access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo." - at least not natively. You can do that through containers, but you can do that with containers on any distro. Where it shines is declaring the complete system configuration (including installed programs and their configuration) in its config file (on file-based configuration, I wouldn't really consider blendos a viable competitor).
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn't offer "access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo." - at least not natively.
I don't quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!
(There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)
"Learning curve" is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I've seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn't help.
Maybe I shouldn't have tried to package openstack on nix.
But I've tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn't have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.
Don't even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.
I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it's the best way for reproducible environments I can share I've found.