I really want to try NixOS but the Nix language is just so damn weird...
It's not really weird when you know a functional language like Haskell or OCaml. My experience was actually the opposite: being a functional language, Nix's syntax was so simple that it took me only a few minutes to grasp most of it.
But if you don't have some FP experience under your belt, both the syntax and commonly-used concepts are strange (e.g. fixed points).
For me the learning curve was knowing what extra functions/functionality is provided by nixpkgs, which lacks quite a lot of documentation and discoverability. I found out about a lot of handy functions and techniques while reading derivations.
I should have kept track of the issues while I was learning Nix/nixpkgs. But at that point I was still determining "do I want this?"
It's not really weird when you know a functional language like Haskell or OCaml. My experience was actually the opposite: being a functional language, Nix's syntax was so simple that it took me only a few minutes to grasp most of it.
But if you don't have some FP experience under your belt, both the syntax and commonly-used concepts are strange (e.g. fixed points).
For me the learning curve was knowing what extra functions/functionality is provided by nixpkgs, which lacks quite a lot of documentation and discoverability. I found out about a lot of handy functions and techniques while reading derivations.
I should have kept track of the issues while I was learning Nix/nixpkgs. But at that point I was still determining "do I want this?"