Some valid points. I’m using Nixos for a while and I know what you’re talking about when saying too complex. I recently tried to switch to flakes and nope’d back hard, since I couldn’t understand what is going on at most examples I saw on github. I guess one needs FP background for it.
Even when you follow instructions the best way you can, they often don’t work.
Problem is, they “do” work, but for a limited time. Implementation changes, which needs a change on the .nix files, which makes some documents obsolete.
Since there is state in
~and/var, so while e.g. Pantheon’s Calendar worked for the maintainer, it didn’t work for me
There are limits. Nixos fixes reproducibility issues up to a point. Some (including me) pushes a bit more with managing ~ states with home manager etc. so we’d have more solid output, but yeah, can’t do magic.
a package can depend on others without requiring them at build time
Never had such issue, runtime dependencies also included in packages.