Fam, I believe your post is all over the place. Please consider to clarify the following:
- What is it that you actually desire?
- Easy installation through a script? Or perhaps through a Kickstart file? Or any of the dozens of other tools used to deploy a fleet of systems?
- Declarative system management? While perhaps not as powerful as NixOS, the industry has been working with tools like Ansible for over a decade.
Basically it feels insane that it's the way most linux users and servers in the world operate.
Frankly, I somewhat agree. But I believe most people operate within paradigms like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." and/or "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.". Isn't "the path of least resistance" what we default to anyways? And if we additionally weigh in sunk cost fallacy, it is no surprise that people are more often than not wed to their ways... Or, at least act upon it.
If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don't more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?
I believe NixOS suffers from the following:
- For the longest time, it really was just niche. Like, NixOS has only fairly recently started to garner a decent audience. Boiling Steam's chart, while it shouldn't be used to gauge the user base of each distro, it does help us in finding trendings within a distro. And for NixOS, it clearly shows how it has slowly but surely grown a significant presence from 2020 onwards. Contrast that to Debian or Fedora that have always had a significant presence (or, at least for over a decade).
- The onboarding experience is absolute horrid. To flake or not? To lix or nixcpp? And I haven't even mentioned how its documentation is just dog water. Or how over the last year its organization has shown clear growing pains.
Anyhow, I'm glad to hear you jumped ship to NixOS! Wish me luck when I enter its hostile waters (with the intent to conquer it) this summer 😉!