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That's.... so strangely diametrically opposite to my experience with Nix. The language itself leaves some things to be desired, and of course no argument on the documentation, but as a build and packaging system I have never in my life experienced fewer headaches. Everything Just Works, every time. Granted, this is on a NixOS system -- I imagine trying to jam a standalone Home Manager install on top of a non-Nixos system is a rather different situation.

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I think that's part of the problem. It seems like the only way to have a good nix experience is to go all in with NixOS. The problem is that is a huge sell for someone who already has an OS they like and the fact that testing out nix standalone is such a pain means you end up with very little confidence in the prospect of migrating everything over. Plus, at least when I considered NixOS a few years ago, the setup instructions seemed not well ironed out and made me really hesitant that it wouldn't brick my system.

All in all I think nix falls into the category of great idea in theory, but the implementation is so lacking in ergonomics and ease of use that I don't see how it could be anything other than a niche build system without major UX updates.

In my experience this isn't true. I use NixOS because it is my preferred OS due to ease of setup and ergonomics. When I have no choice but to use a different OS the tooling is still there for me to use and it works fine. It's the other package managers that I worry about.

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