the effort required to start seems significant to me, especially when we have other methods that just work.
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
I’ve only included a few packages from the actual list, but you can see how simple everything is. It just took me days to get to that point because the docs are really bad.
most things I need are in the Debian repos and for other cases I get by pretty good with appimage s and flatpaks.
I use it to freshen up Debian packages. For example Debian docker is like 4 major versions behind the nix one, and it stopped being supported months ago.
Also, now that I’ve created the list from above, I can just run a single line to reinstall everything I need.