Comment by bsimpson

Easy keyboard access is also a baked in assumption.

I found my way to Nix because I wanted to try SteamOS on nicer hardware than the Steam Deck. Bazzite is the recommendation in that space now, but at the time, there were a lot of equally unknown options. There's a community called Jovian that has replicated the SteamOS setup atop NixOS, using Valve's own sources. Using official sources and taking the chance to learn a new functional programming language seemed like as good a place to start as any.

When it works, it's great; however, +1 to all the gripes.

_Everything_ in Nix is set by writing to a text file and calling a CLI to rebuild. If you don't have ready access to a keyboard, you might not be able to so much as change the timezone. You can end up on obsolete versions of evergreen software like Chrome too, because Nix wants to own everything, and nothing changes until you rebuild.