I’d distinguish between:
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When running into problems: NixOS has the worst distro experience, sure.
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When things work with NixOS, NixOS has the best distro experience.
I think that’s fair. I’d say Nix is 95% wonderful, 5% huge pain in the arse.
It can be a difficult tool to use, and can take a long time to learn / get familiar with. And so, yeah, the experience as a novice can be rough.
I think most Nix users have faced things they weren’t able to do with Nix, but stuck around with it, & were eventually able to get to a place where the value of using NixOS vastly outweighs the cost.
… if I need to use docker flatpak for most of my stuff what is the point of nix and nixos.
Perhaps putting it another way: the cost of doing everything 100% in Nix is too high for a beginner to use Nix & NixOS.
Hopefully Nix is able to eventually reduce the number of painful things which don’t work. (“Lowering barriers to Nix” was a key theme in the 2022 Nix Survey).
But, in the mean time, it’s going to be easier to learn NixOS by using Nix for things you can use it for, and gradually figuring out how to use it for other things later.