At least that's my experience. Although I do prefer Nix over Docker any day, I'd definitely say the learning curve is steeper with Nix, but it's so worth it long-term.
Size of the community, especially if its quality, means you just increased your surface area at getting help for issues you encounter. Which is a very non-trivial concern in a work environment.
Why not? A big community means that you don't have to solve problems on your own, because someone else has probably solved the same problem before you.
If anything, it should be the <<first>> factor when making these decisions.
Well for starter Nix has a wider syntax because it covers much more than Docker + docker-compose. Which it's perfectly fine because they are two different tools that intersects in few use cases.
Syntax to install a few packages:
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ wget vim nano zsh file ];
Including trailing semicolon. Dockerfile on alpine:
RUN apk add vim nano zsh file
I mean, maybe I'm too used to the latter but I really struggle to find the former simpler.
Also “imagine thinking...” is just vapid snark. If you must snark, at least make it substantial.
I can't imagine anyone using both and thinking Nix is more complicated that Docker. And it's not close.
> at least it's not that widely used like Docker is
"Which has more users" would not enter the top ten reasons I'd choose between tools like this.