alt Hacker NewsThis has been my experience as well. Before I switched to NixOS I used ubuntu for 2 years. I never grokked the ways of apt and how or why it would "randomly" brick my system in some way. With NixOS this has never happened. `nix-shell` is dead simple, adding packages to environment is dead simple, never has it bricked my system. The hard part of NixOS is if you want to do advanced things with the actual nix language, and of course the horrible error messages.
In terms of all the linux systems I have used, NixOS seemed to least magical to me in terms of what is happening under the hood.
What?! Insane take. NixOS is where the most "magic" happens, over and under the hood. It brings it's own language!
Simple package based distros like Arch basically just extract archives. Very few packages trigger post-install steps which usually just (re)generate something like initrd.
Afaik, bricking Ubuntu is either due to user error (e.g. mixing incompatible package sources) or the devs released broken/buggy packages...