>>18
NixOS is still painful. You could try GNU Guix. I find it less painful than NixOS, but it's still somewhat painful. Scheme makes Guix less painful. The user interface of Guix is also better than that of NixOS. Guix also has a better selection of Lisp software and libraries.
IMO, the functional package management paradigm has a bright future, but it will take quite some time to:
* Make the user interfaces more user friendly.
* Have better user documentation (without needing to read the source code or ask for basic help on mailing lists).
* Add more packages (especially in the case of GNU Guix, which only has about 19,700 packages).
* Integrate better with existing setups (e.g. desktops, cloud deployment, etc.).