The declarative abstraction of just setting values of options is very nice but I quickly ran into many edge cases where it leaked, which have been fixed years later. Obviously I don't want to wait years but I couldn't figure out how to fix it myself. I was able to overcome the learning curve of all the various hyphenated CLI programs (seriously what's up with that), how home-manager fits in, basics of the nix language, etc., but got stuck at trying to learn nix well enough to actually contribute.

There's a huge barrier in straying from the well-trodden path, and I think that path will always be behind the cutting-edge. In traditional distros I just have to install something or edit a text file somewhere. Prime example right now is pytorch with rocm support. In Arch Linux it's pacman -S python-pytorch-rocm. In NixOS I barely remember and I don't think it even worked for me but I think it was this: https://github.com/nixos-rocm/nixos-rocm#installation

I started using dotdrop to track and manage my user and system configurations and wrote a basic ansible playbook for my desktop install setup which has achieved 90% of what I was looking for in NixOS. These days what intrigues me about NixOS is that it might be a great alternative in the server space as a competitor to using docker or wasm.