1. As you can see from the state of this thread, people see nix or nixpkgs but read nixos. There’s no momentum from the community to push it as an extra package manager, while every thread is spammed with nixos.

2. No gui integrations for casuals. For example Discover integrates flatpaks and snaps, but for nix you need to use the terminal.

3. The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would’ve had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.

Edit:

if anyone’s interested in trying it out, here’s a part of my other comment in this thread

It’s just a list of packages, and an optional flake to control the repositories (stable/unstable) and add packages from outside of the official ones.

To update everything nix related I just run:

cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix flake update && home-manager switch

Part of the reason is that people are still finding out about it, Project has no marketing so it grows organically, in the last year the number of contributors grew by 25 percent.

Another problem is that it still needs polish in term of ease of use, for example it takes me forever to search for packages using the nix-env command but using the website it takes less then a second, That’s a basic feature that still does not work correct, Plus their documentation is still not great in my opinion, I actually helped improved it and the improvement they made is still not really good IMO.

I’m going to go against the grain and say that the Nix and Guix package managers are very good, but they really belong in their respective distros where they’re a core part of the system. That’d be Guix System for Guix and NixOS for Nix.

They may have advantages for a foreign distro too, but they are lesser (Guix System can boot into a backup of the system before the last update, for example, but that advantage doesn’t exist on, say, Debian.

Also, can we agree to not recommend these systems to new users for the time being? While they’re very powerful, they’re absolutely designed for power users, and until they’re more polished and they have fancy GUIs and stuff for installation and package management, I think it’d be best to keep recommending normal distros like Debian for now.

Because nixPKGs have the same Single-Source of Truth wrecking problems as flatpaks and appimages and all that junk.

There’s only so much room in the ecosystem for best-practice-violating product, and systemd takes up a lot of that. And until systemd collapses under the weight of doing a thousand things poorly for all the wrong reasons and delivering on none of its brochure features, the other entrants have to wait outside.

TL:DR; they’re the package managers of the future, and I shill for them, but they’re still buggy in some areas.

Guix and Nix user here. For all I can shill about store-based file hierarchy, ephemeral environment isn’t perfect yet in both of these apps, at least from a GUI application perspective. It’s a bug that I’ve found in Nix, but that should also reflect in Guix. Basically, what’s happening here is that due to some impurity in the environment, it uses libraries from the system instead, and apps may stop working. This is a very serious issue, and is directly related to what you’re talking about. This problem hides itself when using GuixSD in Guix or NixOS in Nix, but in other foreign distro that have dated libraries, it is very much visible, and you’ll be forced to use outdated channels.