Been involved with LLMs for the past 2 years, and what I can say is we have no idea what the technology can do, and we have no way of monitoring when it gains new abilities. We're racing towards autonomous everything, and we're too slow and blind to even detect hidden exponential developments.
Ranting about Nix being hard is like going to Russia and complaining that the local language doesn't sound English. Like many other things worth your time, it's something you learn through deliberate practice and focus.
> That sounds like a massive barrier to entry and more effort than solving the problems I currently have.
It's a lot of effort, and in the end you're left with a different, more interesting set of problems.
I don't regret spending that effort, but it needs to be easier if we want more users. I don't think there's any answer besides lots more effort from the nixos dev side, however.
There are many things that require tremendous practice and study that aren't worth your time as well.
You have to justify it somehow. And I just don't see the value prop in Nix yet. I would compare it as such: Nix is to Docker what Google+ was to Facebook. Maybe it's superior. But the benefits are so marginal that the costs of switching will prohibit most from giving it a shot. Most people want reproducible builds and easy configuration. If they are getting that from Docker, why switch?
At the distro level, average people are going to benefit by having reproducible builds done upstream. Debian does this, IIRC. As does F-Droid and a few others. If you trust Debian, then you implicitly trust the packages Debian installs.
NixOS doesn't even solve the real aspect of Linux that I find terrifying: security. Linux is a blob of overlapping and bewildering security mechanisms and tools. You have groups, permissions, SELinux, capabilities. The whole thing leaks like a sieve.
Identity and time (the process of remembering the past and projecting the future) are two core ideological viruses that shaped humanity, but that's all they are - ideas we've been thought to model the world around with. Intentional thinking is a completely different game.
Nothing is useful until you define where do you want to go. I am privileged to enjoy the world the way it is with all we've got thanks to these concepts, despite them obviously being the primary sources of stress (I bloody wish people didn't use clocks for anything but science). But billions of people and animals struggle and could possibly live happier lives if we didn't get "here". I think the optimum is in the middle - use time and identity but keep aware these are just concepts and avoid taking them seriously. Never really self-identify with your "identity". You are you, not your profession, public image, body appearance, gender, age, ethnicity or anything. Believing "identity" is something real, let alone important, leads to all sorts of struggle and existential crisis ultimately. Just look at some unhappy old people struggling to make sense of their lives after they retired and their children moved away. I feel like I would already go nuts or something if I seriously perceived time and identity the conventional way, wouldn't even need to get old. This probably is what turns people into alcoholics or worse.
If writing text more than 4 hours / day is what you do for a living, and you have at least 10 more years left of doing that, not learning Vim is just lazy. Vim gives you back enough time to think about what you're writing.
Also, if you go cold turkey, you'll be productive in less than a month, and arrive at a good workflow that fits you in less than six months, flow that you will improve over the years in amazing ways.
Here's a good overview to get up to speed: https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ