I used NixOS for 6 months and dropped it for the same reasons. I absolutely love the idea of my entire system being configured through text files, and being easily reproducible, but the amount of work you have to put in to get anything working in that distribution is insane.
Please don't take this personally, but as somebody who programs Rust and quite likes it comments like yours remind me of people who come to Rust with the mindset of their own language, try around for a bit and say nothing works and things are hard to get done.
They are right — however it just shows they didn't understand it yet. A bit like if you gave a pianist a saxophone, and after they got the first decent tone out of it they tell you: "Yeah it is nice and all, but I can't see how you can make real music on it."
I think in IT we tend to forget sometimes that new things that work sufficiently different take their time to master. If you were a nix master and had to learn how to deal with traditional dependency managment you would probably also resign after a while and declare it to hairy to get things done.
Note: there is a chance I completely misrepresent your experience, this isn't meant to talk about you specifically
I think there's a big difference between "I can't see how you can make real music on it." (didn't see anyone say something similar in this thread) versus "I'd have to practice a lot more before I can make real music like I already do on a piano".
Maybe not everyone is ready to invest the required time to see the benefits, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I agree. I still think NixOS is a fantastic and didn't mean to make it sound otherwise. I just don't think the time I'd need to invest to be as comfortable with it as I am with my current setup is worth it, and hope that can change in the future, either through the software itself or me getting more time to devote to it.
As a side note, it's funny that you mentioned Rust. I gave up on Nix when I couldn't for the life of me to get Rust to compile one of my dependencies that needed something to be installed on the OS (it's been a while, I don't remember exactly what it was).
Maybe we're just not there yet.