Nix is typed: there are strings, paths, lists, attrsets, etc;

Not sure what's wrong with CLI, as I don't really use it except nix flake update (although I remember updating stuff installed via nix profile being a bit cumbersome, but it's not exactly a good practice to use it this way);

Good point with cache, although stuff outside of nixpkgs sometimes provides their own caches which are trivial to enable;

Nobody forces you to use github:nixos/nixpkgs, it's just a regular input. Ppl quite often have their own forks. It's also trivial to use stuff from outside nixpkgs (also just another input);

There are different builders (e.g. buildGoModule);

Idk where you've found toxic community, my interactions have been pretty nice so far (mostly matrix rooms);

GUI is optional, just like for all the other package managers. And it exists: https://github.com/snowfallorg/nix-software-center

Perfectly agreed with nix not (yet 🙃) being the best thing that exists, tho, albeit due to different reasons. For example, it's a PITA to debug, and the error messages are sometimes unhelpful.

As it stands now, I don't think nix wants "regular users"; rather it wants user/contributors.

I've got it working a couple of times. In my opinion they need to fix documentation, make flakes an officially supported thing and take it out of beta that it's been in for years so that documentation can be further created, and the installer should work on a majority of devices out of the box.

My laptop was the worse experience. I just wanted KDE and Firefox. I don't use it for much. But, KDE wouldn't load so I had to go into CLI and edit the configuration.nix and change some stuff to get it to work. It's a thinkpad that has official support for Linux. So, it was specifically a nix driver issue. I just installed Arch again and went on like normal. I would love to trust it with a server. But, I just can't.

Is installing a package as simple as $ nix install vscode ? And would it “just work”?

You fool. You absolute buffoon. You're doing it wrong. That's the wrong command, and even if it was the right command, this method could cause issues down the road. It goes against the declarative philosophy of nix. You're supposed to refer to packages by their attribute, rather than name. If you launch the installed app that way, it won't have any hardware accererated graphics becuase hardware accelerated graphics are impure, don't you know this?

You need to read the nonexistent documentation to find all of this out, and then select a declarative solution, like home manager or nix-shell or nix develop, to install software, and nixgl to get hardware accelerated graphics for nix packages on non nix systems.

(/s (ish) over)

Yeah. Nix has some issues. If you just want more packages available, I would recommend distrobox.

It's a very powerful tool, and I use nix to manage all of my development environments, but it has some severe limitations that only have hacky workarounds. I could not get hardware accelerated nix packages to have a working dekstop entry. So instead, I have to type nixGLIntel gzdoom in my terminal when I want to play doom.

In addition to that, the documentation is very poor.

The other comments in this thread elaborate on these, and a few other issues.

I mean, yeah, it's nix profile install nixpkgs#vscode and it should kinda work. Although to run it, you might have to also do nix profile install github:nix-community/nixgl --impure and then run vscode as nixGL code because of video driver awfulness.