I feel like NixOS’s complexity and steep learning curve is overestimated

Like, yea, IT IS harder than your usual debibuntu fedora, but I only wasted less than half of a day in a VM just trying out it and referencing third party guides on how to do your usual stuff here, then next day I in slightly more than half of a day already installed it on bare metal and set up same system I had on Fedora on that device, including Wireguard and Syncthing services with configs remade in decralative nix syntax, which was actually optional and I could still use my old backed up ones.

Though, I am a person that:

- Has some experience with linux command line and configs
- Has experience in constantly googling instead of using only official documentation
- Heard tons of info about features NixOS has on paper before, but didn’t learn how to use them
- Has experience in setting up stuff like Arch when you need to install a lot of apps manually
- Has some experience with programming, though I didn’t feel that nix configuration is much about programming, for now it was just a more complex config syntax

I completely don’t want to say it is ideal, “more” ideal than something else, or even “suited for everyone”. It has issues with even just installing python script that was not ported to nix yet, and I am not a person that just came from gui-only, and it’s quirks will be too too much for beginners that didn’t learn “normal” linux. And maybe it has accessibility issues beyond usual linux ones, I didn’t check.

But even with all of that, NixOS is near ideal for me specifically, since I love tinkering with software when it already works out of box (Nix actually has graphical installer, ability install with DE of choice, language choosing, and just working software, unlike something like Alpine), and I’m a programmer and a person who like to build some things from source, but doesn’t like that system is filled with dependencies I didn’t delete.