It's not bad experimenting, but a thing is experimenting and have a mainline with a clear path, another is having only experiments, mostly undocumented, hard to discover, and so on.
What most people want from a distro? Being rock solid and functional with the minimum effort for anything. NixOS offer that formally, well, stating it's legacy because Flakes are the future, but their are still not there, than NixOps/Disnix and so on, this does not play with this other etc etc etc. Essentially a generic user, not a developer, have hard time to craft a stable infra with stable tech and so most fear the change reducing the community to a nearly devs-only show and enterprise player show.
Debian docs in general aren't excellent but Debian is a well known dinosaurs so most of it's users already know it, there is no need to teach anything to most, those who do not know simply ask their side friend. NixOS while not new it's still unknown to many so it have to teach well from zero various people, who aren't interested in NixOS development itself but only in it's use, model, that will contribute with return of experience, translations, casual patches and no more. They might be seen as a burden to devs, but they are "the base" that grant any distro enough popularity to really thrive.
Ubuntu back than succeed over Debian because of that. They gives a sane, ready-to-work base. There is no need to a NixOS GUI installer or so, that's not a potential target, but there is a damn need to tell anyone "start with that, learn that, in 5 and 10 years it will be the same evolved properly" No one want to learn and relearn things.
NixOS and flakes are orthogonal. Flakes are not a replacement for NixOS, they are simply a _lockfile specification_, akin to your requirements.txt or Cargo.toml or such. NixOS is not legacy.
It's not bad experimenting, but a thing is experimenting and have a mainline with a clear path, another is having only experiments, mostly undocumented, hard to discover, and so on.
What most people want from a distro? Being rock solid and functional with the minimum effort for anything. NixOS offer that formally, well, stating it's legacy because Flakes are the future, but their are still not there, than NixOps/Disnix and so on, this does not play with this other etc etc etc. Essentially a generic user, not a developer, have hard time to craft a stable infra with stable tech and so most fear the change reducing the community to a nearly devs-only show and enterprise player show.
Debian docs in general aren't excellent but Debian is a well known dinosaurs so most of it's users already know it, there is no need to teach anything to most, those who do not know simply ask their side friend. NixOS while not new it's still unknown to many so it have to teach well from zero various people, who aren't interested in NixOS development itself but only in it's use, model, that will contribute with return of experience, translations, casual patches and no more. They might be seen as a burden to devs, but they are "the base" that grant any distro enough popularity to really thrive.
Ubuntu back than succeed over Debian because of that. They gives a sane, ready-to-work base. There is no need to a NixOS GUI installer or so, that's not a potential target, but there is a damn need to tell anyone "start with that, learn that, in 5 and 10 years it will be the same evolved properly" No one want to learn and relearn things.