That’s just it. Nix has been growing significantly. A third of its new users were gotten in 2022, the year after I FINALLY joined the club (after scoffing at it for... at least a decade? I was one of you, basically...).
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983
Have you worked at a startup? Do you know what a “hockey stick” growth curve looks like? Because Nix may be on the cusp of one.
Its package repo (check out search.nixos.org) has more packages that are ready to download and run than any other Linux distro, while having fewer maintainers than most distros. If nothing else, this alone speaks to the power of deterministic builds and runs. When something doesn’t randomly break, turns out that it needs much lower maintenance and thus fewer people…
The funny thing about NixOS (and I heard about this before I experienced it, which I found intriguing at the time and which I can now say is very real) is that the second you "grok" it... you will want it on ALL of your machines
So when I dove in, I said "I'm going to figure out how this works and then simplify it." Unfortunately, the closest I've come to that so far (and this is partially due to... having a 2 year old and working at a startup) is this commandline wrapper that makes most of what I need Nix to do, easy: https://github.com/pmarreck/ixnay
I still don't understand the entirety of the Nix language, but this is an excellent, excellent interactive tour: https://nixcloud.io/tour/
