Comment by Cyph0n

I generally agree.

Nix is an excellent build tool. I use it for all of my projects now. And when building is tricky, e.g. Elixir, I rely on Nix devshells to get my tools setup.

NixOS is an amazing server distro. My primary home server VM is running NixOS and it has been rock solid and easy to maintain. I plan to run NixOS exclusively as I add more machines.

But I haven’t had a good experience with NixOS on my development VM (as compared to Ubuntu or Debian). You end up spending more work than expected up front just to get something working. One recent frustrating experience was trying to get VS Code Server to run on NixOS so that I could connect to it over SSH. Ultimately I just gave up.