Nix the package manager is great. Poorly documented, but it works as expected. I've also had uneventful experiences using NixOS on a server.
On the other hand, trying to use NixOS on my laptop has been struggle after struggle. Every update breaks something. Many times updates cause the entire system to crash. Different combinations of display managers, window managers, and various system level daemons interact in complex ways.
None of this is the fault of NixOS, really it is the fault of the Unix philosophy scaled to the level of the desktop Linux ecosystem, combined with the traditional assurance on upstream developers that packagers in distros like Ubuntu will fix their shit.
What would be really great for NixOS would be a set of various well tested base configurations for the various DE/WM combos, like all the spinoff Ubuntu distros. These would fix the versions of all the fragile graphical components on some kind of release schedule, while probably still using nixos-unstable underneath for all the relatively reliable stuff like the kernel, emacs, vim, coreutils, etc.
Yes, this is something that I think is really important in the future. NixOS really needs something like Ubuntu is to Debian or Manjaro is to Arch. Lots of polishing that a standard Linux user can start using out of the box (no instructions required).
On the other hand, trying to use NixOS on my laptop has been struggle after struggle. Every update breaks something. Many times updates cause the entire system to crash. Different combinations of display managers, window managers, and various system level daemons interact in complex ways.
None of this is the fault of NixOS, really it is the fault of the Unix philosophy scaled to the level of the desktop Linux ecosystem, combined with the traditional assurance on upstream developers that packagers in distros like Ubuntu will fix their shit.
What would be really great for NixOS would be a set of various well tested base configurations for the various DE/WM combos, like all the spinoff Ubuntu distros. These would fix the versions of all the fragile graphical components on some kind of release schedule, while probably still using nixos-unstable underneath for all the relatively reliable stuff like the kernel, emacs, vim, coreutils, etc.