Comment by dminik

Yeah, same.

I originally had a very positive nix experience. I had to fix some docker build issue at work. This particular dockefile needed the buildx command. Except for whatever reason I just couldn't install the needed component for buildx to work. Somewhere during a messy Ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04 upgrade something broke and now I was getting a conflict (with nothing btw, it's just empty).

I used nix to install docker and the required component with no hassle and was able to get on with my work.

Inspired by this experience I wanted to evaluate nix for a more long-term usage. I setup my personal PC to dualboot windows and nixos. The trouble started basically immediately.

I couldn't get KDE plasma 6 to work with Wayland. It turns out that you need to also enable Wayland support in sddm. Why the official installer did not do this or why this was only documented on some random unrelated page in one of the two wikis I couldn't tell.

Ok, video working I immediately spotted another problem. I set up my disk encryption, login and kde wallet passwords to match in the hopes that on boot I will only have to enter it once (this is an option you can enable). Login screen worked, but kwallet just wouldn't log in automatically. I spent literal hours on this over the past year each time walking away frustrated. Is this a nix issue, Linux issue or kwallet issue? Who knows. Eventually I just set an empty password for kwallet. This still didn't solve my git ssh keys not loading automatically. I just gave up.

Most importantly, dev environments just do not want to work with VSCode. The recommended extension stopped working years ago, the other extension still works but there's no way to force a specific load order so randomly other extensions will just not see your nix env. I had to resort to installing rust globally just so I could get rust analyzer working. So much for dev environments. I don't even want to go over how much working with package managers when using nix for building sucks (particularly npm/pnpm/yarn).

If I had installed nix on a work laptop they would have fired me for wasting time. Next time I'm trying one of the immutable config driven distros. Hopefully that is going to work better.