Comment by nextos

> Better tooling is an exponent to our productivity

Nix & NixOS have made me much more productive. Maintaining a desktop is effortless. If something breaks, I can simply reboot to a previous installation. I can also try software without installing, and develop parallel projects relying on dependencies that would be mutually incompatible in a regular imperative package manager.

But I recognize that if you need to do something slightly unusual, documentation is incomplete and scattered. For simple things, my contrarian view is that Nix is not hard at all. The subset of Nix I use can be learned in a couple of hours. I think the trick is to avoid getting sucked into packaging complex software with messy build systems. If the stack you use is well packaged in NixPkgs, it's a joy to use. If it's not, it's better to stay away.