I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I have in my other machines.
I tend to use lots of custom tools and commands, that are really painful to install and setup for a new machine. With NixOS all of it is just one command away.
But, I agree, it is REALLY HARD in the beginning to grasp things.
"It's hard to grasp things" is only one part of the problem. I mentioned that there's no good way to understand nixpkgs except to manually traverse the file tree. Grokking the directory scheme will help a bit, but there's no amount of Nix Nirvana that will make it as easy as hovering over the parameter in VS Code.
In other cases, things are just broken--my nix installed rustup is failing to build packages this morning with a clang linker error (can't find iconv) and Googling the error message + 'rust' indicates that this problem is only encountered in Nix environments. Similarly, many of the other problems are that it requires you to repackage other libraries from the ground up. For example, most Python packages are available in Pypi such that users can just `pip install` them. Nixpkgs has a `pypiPackage` function that allows us to import a package from Pypi, but if that package has C dependencies (and many do, because Python's performance sucks and Python's performance sucks because everything depends on C packages precluding optimizations to the interpreter, but that's a gripe for another day) then Nix requires you to package those C dependencies in Nix first, and because every C package has its own bespoke build system with implicit dependencies, you must be expert in each individual C package in the dependency tree. Again, there's no amount of Nix Nirvana that will save you from this.
In many other cases (e.g., my 'packaging vs code with my rust plugins' example from my earlier post) we have to know the specific conventions for specific nixpkgs functions which will vary from others, and even that might not be enough. These conventions can't be derived from any general understanding or intuition of Nix (i.e., "Nix Nirvana") although it certainly doesn't hurt.
Further, NixOS is easy mode. It's the first class citizen in the Nix ecosystem. Other platforms don't work so well. In my vs code + rust plugins example, there were several posts documenting the process on NixOS, but for whatever reason Nix on other platforms (e.g., macOS) requires different configuration which is undocumented and even proficient Nix users couldn't figure out the issue.
But yeah, to your point, it is really hard to grasp as well, which exacerbates all of the above problems.
I get your problems, and I agree with you this is not always great.
I'm mostly writing Rust, so as long as I have `libssl` available, I don't really need to tweak my system that much to be able to work. I definitely would reconsider, if my work would involve using Python...
Although, I'm kind of interested about the challenge of understanding the packaging of these dependencies you're talking about. Making the whole compilation setup nice and clean with nix. But, I don't know, I get it it's not for everybody. And it also might be these lockdowns that put me to this mode of doing stuff such as tweaking NixOS.
Then, again, computers are my hobby. And new challenge is always accepted!
I tend to use lots of custom tools and commands, that are really painful to install and setup for a new machine. With NixOS all of it is just one command away.
But, I agree, it is REALLY HARD in the beginning to grasp things.
Here's my configs if you want to see how I approached my own setup: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos