I'm not really anti-nix, but never really understood the appeal.

Linux is already a niche market, and this is some subset of that. I've been running a home grown Arch variant for years without a single issue. Why someone like me would want to type everything out as some config language is beyond me.

I could likely completely nuke my setup and redo it all in less time and effort than learning Nix. In fact, I can say it takes about an hour - I usually do it anually.

Overtime the best configuration tended to be just using the defaults because getting used to a tmux.conf on one machine would just become an annoyance one I was on a machine without it. (Plus now you need to use about 12 different configuration languages :))

A huge advantage Nix has over any other configuration tool is that is a single source of truth. A normal dotfiles repo doesn't know anything about the actual programs or OS so it's very easy for it to become incompatible with a machine's actual state.

On Nix, tools like home-manager [1] especially when used in a flake-template like devos [2] just solves this problem really well. It's very easy to make a change, switch to the new configuration, and then commit the change. Managing bespoke services and scripts is very easy because one file in Nix can create a service with a script's contents, create a user, install necessary packages, etc.

I think (desktop) Linux is partly a niche market because the management can be very complex. Nix is certainly very complex itself but its structured enough that it can create very simple systems. There are already several NixOS based OS's that are basically just configuration templates. I could certainly see a more user-friendly distro being released using Nix as the foundation.

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://github.com/divnix/devos