Thanks, and that's the right thing to do... I deliberately phrased it so you can't tell if it's sarcasm. I mean the "weirdness" is a bit due to how it works very differently than the usual Linux distribution. I mean it's not really objectively weird, these things are there for a reason. But it's subjectively very weird and confusing to anyone who dares to apply their pre-existing Linux knowledge... Because there's a lot of additional stuff to factor in.

And I didn't mention the upsides. You can easily define and manage reproducible development environments. Roll something out to 500 servers or workstations without any effort and it'll install your Firefox addons and bookmarks and favorite shell customizations while at it. It's highly customizable. And if it's in there, you can install a mailserver or Nextcloud with 10 lines of code and one command. And it'll usually be very easy to maintain after that. It can roll back the system and a few nice things.

So it's gonna save a lot of time as well, if you use things to your advantage. But I highly doubt that's going to be someone's average desktop Linux install. Other than that I think my portrayal of the underlying complexity, the disorganized documentation and the learning curve (which is as steep as a wall) is somewhat accurate.

I'm glad we have all the options available with Linux. And there's some valid niche for all of them. Just think twice whether those highly specialized ones are what you need. I think NixOS is quite an investment in learning things, poking at stuff and getting lost in side-quests. Whether that's wasted time in total, entirely depends on what you do with it later. I tried it. And I like it and hate it at the same time. And I wasted more time on it than I'm willing to admit.... It's not bad, just a lot. And the average admin or user might not need all the things it's good at.