This matches my experience as well. I’ve been trying to use nix either as a system package manager, package manager, or OS since 2019. It was first recommended to me in 2016.

I’ve tried to use it for C++, Python, and Flutter development. I’ve tried to use it on MacOS and NixOS.

There doesn’t seem to be any use case where it’s usable for regular people. I can use it, sometimes, but more often than not it breaks and fixing it becomes the project over the project I was trying to use it for, before I have to give up and abandon it for conventional, less aspirational but actually usable tools.

Just the other day it broke because of a MacOS beta update. The suggested fix in a PR to reinstall it didn’t work. The uninstall instructions didn’t work. In the end, after some manual fidgeting and more ad hoc suggestions on PRs plus some informed guesswork on my part having to do with the ca store at various stages, I was able to restore my install to functioning.

Every time I ran the install it was text-based and filled my screen with intermediate commands and asked me whether it should execute some command that nobody but a POSIX skilled person would understand. Even after trying to tell it not to bother me.

The community has seemed obsessed with flakes that will fragment the ecosystem and lock nixpkgs into backwards compatibility (to some practical degree). Meanwhile when I tried to contribute back to nixpkgs, and an update broke my patch (a derivation that made specifying application derivations roughly as easy as homebrew), no one on the forums could tell me how to fix it.

Now it seems like the community, or some fraction of it, is chasing social perfection while their own tool is in such a half-baked state that I can’t recommend it to anybody, and almost nobody technical that I interact with recognizes it.

Meanwhile, in the time that nix has been…doing whatever it’s been doing, docker has become the de facto standard for reproducible environments. It’s hypothetically not as good, but practically it’s a whole lot easier to use, so now nix has to push back an entrenched competitor if it wants to become more than just this weird niche tool that nobody’s heard of.

I guess if the community doesn’t care if people use their work or not, I can’t blame them if they want to spend their free time on theoretical solutions. But it seems more inability to recognize other people’s hardships and arrogance rather than intentional neglect.

Someday I really hope someone figures this out, because having a cross-platform cross-purpose cross-language declarative package manager would be awesome.

EDIT: Also, one thing that’s bothered me about the recent Nix drama has been how they treat their “own” people. What I’ve heard or seen project leadership or moderation doing has come across as capricious, spiteful, and entitled towards people who have invested huge amounts of time into Nix; regardless of the politics of the individuals involved.

It’s turned me off from continuing to invest in Nix either as a contributor or a user (I was even questioning fixing my preexisting install, but I figured deciding on an alternative and switching right then would take more time). I’m hoping an alternative comes to light, or somehow I’ve misjudged the situation.