[struanr]

Personally I went from Arch to NixOS and now back to Arch. Whilst I can appreciate the power of NixOS it felt like such a huge amount of abstraction and secret sauce it made it impossible to fit in my head. In addition, the documentation and debugging experience of the Nix language were very poor. Nix shell was useful for trying out programs temporarily, however I found it a poor substitute for native Python and Julia package managers, especially for scientific work where a requirements.txt is useful to a lot more people than a flake.nix

Going back to Arch has felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything is simple, easy to understand and incredibility well documented. Using a snapper pacman hook I can now revert my system to undo updates, which was the main functionality I found useful in NixOS.

[sandbach]

It's worth noting that the benefits of Nix shell you mention can be enjoyed from the comfort of another distro with the Nix package manager.