blobcode - issues with nix (wip)

Inspired by this comment on hacker news, I feel as a fairly excited nix user that I could take a stab at lot of the issues and papercuts I’ve experienced in my time with nix and nixos. I’m highlighting a lot of issues that are at the forefront for anyone wanting to learn / adopt nix. As follows are some of the issues that I’ve experienced and that can (hopefully) be rectified, because although I do really like nixos, It’s just not really ready for a large production environment (in my opinion).

docs

The biggest issue, by far and away with nix as a whole is a massive lack of documentation. Although things may have improved, there’s still massive amounts of documentation that is either out of date or simply nonexistent. The biggest help in this category is the nixos package search, which I still find myself relying on even as a relatively experienced nix user. This is also pretty evident in the surrounding nixos community - there are heaps and heaps of posts praising nixos, with comparatively many fewer guides or help resources for beginners.

compatibility

Nixos also (like any emerging technology, to be fair), is quite lacking when comes to backwards-compatibility - although the os is great about this, the language and surrounding tooling is… significantly less so. The big ecosystem-level issue here is the channels/flakes divide, where although flakes