The problem is that "should" is papered over a system not designed that way from the start, and in a heterogeneous world which operates in its own way, not Nix's way.

So it's just an eternal battle between the real world and the fantasy Nix world, built on an army of thousands of volunteers writing up .nix files and contributing packages, and trying to tame the beast of Unix complexity.

Except most of us are just trying to get things done and now I work in a shop where I can't even run a development setup with my favoured IDE, or just "cargo run" my package, because Nix has been placed in the middle of everything.

Clearly in a sincere effort to tame complexity, but in the process creating a whole new world of it, with a lot of normative lifestyle assumptions.

To me... in my experience... Nix promises a lot more than it can realistically deliver, comes with a totalizing world view, and in practice ends up making life more complicated unless you completely and totally buy into its way of doing everything, and are willing to leave many of your old tools and practices behind.

The right way to tame complexity is not that much of a hassle. This is why virtualization and containers have been so successful. Make the OS immutable by converting into a nested Russian doll of OSes with specific instances being mutable but also disposable.

It’s ugly in its own way but it has the virtue of not exchanging one ugly complexity tax (OS rot and manual admin) with another (a complicated “manager” that wants to get in the way).

I kind of dig the idea of a unikernel world where there's just a hypervisor and applications running directly on top of it shipping only the bits of the OS they need.