Every time I try to use NixOS I start off excited about all the benefits it can provide, but it always ends up frustrating me in some way and I'm reminded of why distributions exist in the first place. I don't want to have to dig into a config file for every little aspect of my OS to be in working order and then worry about having some hackey workaround when something has issues due to the lack of adherence to the FHS.
> I don't want to have to dig into a config file for every little aspect of my OS to be in working order
When I see comments like this about NixOS I feel like I must have been using a different breed of distro before and switched to a different NixOS than you did.
My experience has been that other distros—even the supposedly stable ones like Debian—are disasters waiting to happen with no clear way of understanding what goes wrong when you do an upgrade and it breaks. Instead of one config file to troubleshoot I have hundreds of config files that I don't even know about that might be at fault. Or it could be not even a config file, it could be that there's a version mismatch that can't be resolved.
For me NixOS's config file is a breath of fresh air. If something on my system breaks it's because I made a change to that single config file. If something on my system isn't working yet it's fixable in that single config file.
The system is far from perfect, but it's much better than the black magic that other distros lean on.
I think having to debug to find problem of your system is frustrating. But with NixOS, I at least won't be afraid of "breaking the system" or doing something "irreversible". This is totally a peace of mind when tinkering with my setup.
