Comment by grumpyprole

> To me that's a large part of the very definition of a useful general purpose OS is that it's flexible and enables you to do whatever you need to do today,

NixOS gains most of its power from restrictions. These restrictions enable awesome things like starting a shell with all dependencies in seconds versus minutes using alternative technologies (used by great effect by replit). Nix works surprisingly well for most software, but anything with a ton of dynamic dependencies is going to cause issues. Even knowing what the dependencies might be statically can be hard. Sure, providing an OS with no restrictions and complete flexibility is an option, but then you'll just end up no better off.

Whatever the future of operating systems will be, it certainly will involve more restrictions and less flexibility.