I'll be honest: I don't understand why you wanted to try NixOS out in the first place. It sounds like Pop!_OS works for you? Great! Enjoy. It doesn't work for me.
Not that you're asking, but I found your review pretty uncharitable. You pretty clearly don't want any of the benefits the Nix ecosystem provided. NixOS is not competing with Pop!_OS, and I wouldn't recommend to non-technical users. It really sounds like you want to use snap or flatpak, so I'd recommend those -- they also work well on NixOS.
As for your review, in particular:
- you changed the desktop environment from the default, which is fine, but a lot of your problems are the result of that choice. The default is KDE, and I find it works perfectly well. How does Pop!_OS fare if I install XFCE?
- lengthy rant about /bin/bash vs /usr/bin/env bash, I found boring since the latter has already won as far as I can tell, and righteously so. The whole point of NixOS is to deprecate a traditional FHS, and then you complain about the lack of FHS. Okay.
- You give up on Steam immediately. I run Steam rather successfully and I've managed to play more games on Linux than ever before, I can count on one hand the number of games I've been unable to start, and it's usually because of shitty DRM.
- you don't understand the difference between nix-env and configuration.nix, so I don't think you read the manual.
- you just want to use existing dotfiles/configuration instead of learning how home-manager workapo
- you describe difficulties getting the VLC developer environment set up, but the instructions were not written for NixOS. What are you hoping to accomplish? The Nix way would be to open a shell for the VLC derivation, which works fine without installing Docker. You didn't even try this.
- you somehow don't mention the most obvious pain point everyone runs into, which is that you can't usually trivially download and run binaries as there is no FHS, so binaries don't know where to find runtime dependencies.
> The idea that you have to study the entire programming model of an OS (not just vaguely understand it, which I do, but study it) to use it, and if you think it's not worth the effort, it's because you haven't tried it yet, is inane.
Have you used MacOS before? How did you get started with Linux? Why is Pop!_OS intuitive to you?
You don't need to study, but you need to develop and foster an understanding of how the systems operate. This has always been true. This system is different, but you want it not to be. You're installing your own operating system but then expect to be pandered to. You're seriously exaggerating the effort involved.
Ultimately this isn't a productive conversation. You're not interested in change without a seamless transition, which NixOS does not purport to offer. It's been around for a while, sure, but it's been a pet project for most of its life. Debian is nearly twice as old, and Ubuntu built upon Debian, and Pop!_OS built upon Ubuntu. They're all pretty much the same. NixOS is quite different. In time, we'll see the same polish along with spin-off distros.
Not that you're asking, but I found your review pretty uncharitable. You pretty clearly don't want any of the benefits the Nix ecosystem provided. NixOS is not competing with Pop!_OS, and I wouldn't recommend to non-technical users. It really sounds like you want to use snap or flatpak, so I'd recommend those -- they also work well on NixOS.
As for your review, in particular:
- you changed the desktop environment from the default, which is fine, but a lot of your problems are the result of that choice. The default is KDE, and I find it works perfectly well. How does Pop!_OS fare if I install XFCE?
- lengthy rant about /bin/bash vs /usr/bin/env bash, I found boring since the latter has already won as far as I can tell, and righteously so. The whole point of NixOS is to deprecate a traditional FHS, and then you complain about the lack of FHS. Okay.
- You give up on Steam immediately. I run Steam rather successfully and I've managed to play more games on Linux than ever before, I can count on one hand the number of games I've been unable to start, and it's usually because of shitty DRM.
- you don't understand the difference between nix-env and configuration.nix, so I don't think you read the manual.
- you just want to use existing dotfiles/configuration instead of learning how home-manager workapo
- you describe difficulties getting the VLC developer environment set up, but the instructions were not written for NixOS. What are you hoping to accomplish? The Nix way would be to open a shell for the VLC derivation, which works fine without installing Docker. You didn't even try this.
- you somehow don't mention the most obvious pain point everyone runs into, which is that you can't usually trivially download and run binaries as there is no FHS, so binaries don't know where to find runtime dependencies.
> The idea that you have to study the entire programming model of an OS (not just vaguely understand it, which I do, but study it) to use it, and if you think it's not worth the effort, it's because you haven't tried it yet, is inane.
Have you used MacOS before? How did you get started with Linux? Why is Pop!_OS intuitive to you?
You don't need to study, but you need to develop and foster an understanding of how the systems operate. This has always been true. This system is different, but you want it not to be. You're installing your own operating system but then expect to be pandered to. You're seriously exaggerating the effort involved.
Ultimately this isn't a productive conversation. You're not interested in change without a seamless transition, which NixOS does not purport to offer. It's been around for a while, sure, but it's been a pet project for most of its life. Debian is nearly twice as old, and Ubuntu built upon Debian, and Pop!_OS built upon Ubuntu. They're all pretty much the same. NixOS is quite different. In time, we'll see the same polish along with spin-off distros.