It took me a single afternoon to learn the basics and start using it. Contrary to what I initially thought, I didn't have to migrate all of my dotfiles at once. Then over the next couple of days, Codex migrated everything else for me.

One major benefit for me is that I no longer need to have once-in-a-while tools installed, because I can always spin up a temporary shell with `nix-shell -p packageName`. This significantly decreased the amount of software I have in my environment.

This works great with agentic coding. Agent wants to run `ripgrep`, but you don't have it? Tell it to run `nix run nixpkgs#ripgrep` instead.

But the biggest benefit is that now that you know Nix! So you can start using it to create reproducible development environments and uninstall mise, asdf, nvm, pyenv, etc. You can spin up reproducible servers running NixOS and never touch Ansible again. You can even install it in your router.

Or you can do none of that and continue just using it for your dotfiles. It plays nice with other tools.

It's not complexity its questionable documentation. Picking up Nix is really hard yet the best we got is a mishmash of unofficial recourses and many of them are out of date and/or focus on the packaging side which is terrible for introduction.

Guix solves the same problem in similar ways, though it uses Scheme as its configuration language.

how nix-pilled do you have to be to think that nix is the "only real solution" to dotfile managers?

A agree, Nix is very doable. With Deepseek or other cheaper models, you could get a whole headache-free setup done in one weekend for a few cents on the dollar.

Nix doesn't work on windows.

It's also a massive pain the ass to work with

Nix's complexity isn't with itself, its if you try to step one bit off the beaten path where it immediately starts to grate.