I think that might have changed with the release of flox: https://flox.dev, it’s basically seamless (and that’s not surprising coming from DE Shaw).
Nix doesn’t really make sense without flakes and nix-command, those things are documented as experimental and defaulted off. The documentation story is getting better, but it’s not there. nixlang is pretty cool once you learn it well, but it’s never going to be an acceptable barrier to entry at the mainstream. It’s not really the package manager it’s advertised as, nix-env -iA foo is basically never what you want. It’s completely unsurprising that it’s still a secret weapon of companies with an appetite for bleeding-edge shit that requires in-house expertise.
flox addresses all of this for the “try it out and immediately have a better time” barrier.
Nix/NixOS or something like it is going to send Docker to the same dustbin Subversion is in now, but that’s not going to happen until it has the GitHub moment, and then it’ll happen all at once.
Most of the complaints with Nix in this thread are technically false, but eminently understandable and more importantly (repeat after me Nix folks): it’s never the users fault.
I’m aware that I’m part of a shrinking cohort who ever knew a world without git/GitHub, so I know this probably sounds crazy to a large part of the readership, but listen to Linus explaining to a room full of people who passed the early Google hiring bar why they should care about a tool they feel is too complicated for them: