Comment by offmycloud

I gave NixOS a try recently, and generally liked it. I could get over the arcane packaging language and hit-or-miss documentation. The red flag for me was the inattention to software freedom. Most other distros like Debian or Fedora have source packages or SRPMs that include everything needed to rebuild a package from scratch. Nix pushes binary packages, and even stores them in S3, but with no matching source packages that I could find. They tout reproducible builds, but really haven't considered to how to deal with the "disapearing sources" problem, including vanishing git repositories. I grabbed some URLs that pointed to sources in the old Nix Tarball Cache and they all returned 404. Nix has no longer term plan to preserve package sources.