davidcox143

They also link this very lengthy blog post:

The learning curve is a thing, although I'd argue that it's nowhere near as steep as the tools many of us use every day (C++, Rust, AWS/GCP, etc.)

Nix's "difficulty" IMO comes from defaults that are not sane and a split community. For example, if you use the official Nix installer, flakes are not enabled by default (despite being widely used [1]), but they are if you use the Determinate Systems Nix installer.

Flakes are realistically the only way to obtain the benefits that motivate learning Nix (deterministic pure builds, fine-grained control over dependencies) and are the "primary driver of Nix's adoption" [2]. AFIK there isn't a viable alternative to flakes other than maybe atoms [3], which are relatively new (like "lock files are totally hand made" new [4]). Yet, the official Nix stance on flakes is to wait... for... what?

For a day-in-the-life look at more of Nix's rough edges, I posted some rambles here [5].