Linux

1. As you can see from the state of this thread, people see nix or nixpkgs but read nixos. There's no momentum from the community to push it as an extra package manager, while every thread is spammed with nixos.

2. No gui integrations for casuals. For example Discover integrates flatpaks and snaps, but for nix you need to use the terminal.

3. The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would've had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.

Edit:

if anyone's interested in trying it out, here's a part of my other comment in this thread

It's just a list of packages, and an optional flake to control the repositories (stable/unstable) and add packages from outside of the official ones.

To update everything nix related I just run:

cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix flake update && home-manager switch

NixOS sounds amazing in some regards, but I'm not really interested in learning a whole programming language for it... I have enough to do already.

Part of the reason is that people are still finding out about it, Project has no marketing so it grows organically, in the last year the number of contributors grew by 25 percent.

Another problem is that it still needs polish in term of ease of use, for example it takes me forever to search for packages using the nix-env command but using the website it takes less then a second, That's a basic feature that still does not work correct, Plus their documentation is still not great in my opinion, I actually helped improved it and the improvement they made is still not really good IMO.

I maintain some software, and Nix is by far the hardest to deal with. To package config files are relatively complex, and to submit a package you have to download the entire Nix repo, which is huge. Getting a package to build correctly can be a challenge.

It's a pretty large ask for software contributors, who may have to iteract with a half dozen different distros. Now, you could say, leave it to the distro people to do the packaging, but it remains a barrier for entry and is by nature exclusive.

I don't use NixOS, so I have little motivation to stay conversant with Nix and, frankly, it's so demanding I don't bother anymore. I can make RPM, deb, and aur packages trivially, and without having to hold Gb of some package repo (which I otherwise don't use) on my disk.

the aur has everything I need

Was curious myself don't like flatpaks & appimages much, but from a quick googling, they don't seem to integrate with the desktop so you need to launch them from terminal? That is a deal breaker for me at least.

yeah, everybody should use them. I usually write my own kernel mods tailored for my hardware and certain needs, I don't know why not everyone is doing that. admittedly is a bit janky maintaining a separate kernel fork, but you get used to it, everyone should do it

Pacman (and paru and the AUR) and chezmoi works fine, I don't see any reason to switch.

I'm going to go against the grain and say that the Nix and Guix package managers are very good, but they really belong in their respective distros where they're a core part of the system. That'd be Guix System for Guix and NixOS for Nix.

They may have advantages for a foreign distro too, but they are lesser (Guix System can boot into a backup of the system before the last update, for example, but that advantage doesn't exist on, say, Debian.

Also, can we agree to not recommend these systems to new users for the time being? While they're very powerful, they're absolutely designed for power users, and until they're more polished and they have fancy GUIs and stuff for installation and package management, I think it'd be best to keep recommending normal distros like Debian for now.

For me personally, I just haven't taken any steps into the nix environment. Seems rather complex, setting up those nix files and stuff.

I use Debian on servers and LMDE on my PC, most things I need are in the Debian repos and for other cases I get by pretty good with appimage s and flatpaks. Installing is just a simple command and me happy.

Nixpkgs are probably easy too, I assume. I know a lot of people really like nix, but the effort required to start seems significant to me, especially when we have other methods that just work.