The sad thing about this read is that none of the criticisms are necessarily leveled as Nix as a system, but are purely about how the ecosystem is managed.

Counterpoint, I have been using Nix for several months and have no problems.

I use LLM's ALOT for the config file which is in a custom nix DSL. I couldn't imagine how long it would take before LLM's.

But with an LLM I'm pretty happy with nix.

Everything I've heard about NixOS...well, it sucks. Sorry.

The ideas behind it are interesting. The reality of living with it, the benefits are basically minimal/none and you have to learn a whole big thing that isn't applicable anywhere else.

In the container era it makes even less sense.

I've been using NixOS for the last year and have loved it. Rebuilding doesn't fail for me nearly as often as it does for the author. Running nix garbage collection frequently isn't a big deal and can easily be automated. The network usage is a fair point. But IMO a small price to pay for keeping all of my devices perfectly in sync and running into weird "works on my machine" issues way less frequently.

I wish Arch could learn some lessons from NixOS packaging. One thing that really bothers me about Arch is how many pain points there are in the packaging tooling. Furthermore, I wish AUR packagers used utilities like namcap and chroot building to check their packages before pushing their slop onto the AUR; whenever I use new software from the AUR, I check the PKGBUILD to see how well it was made.