That could just as easily be attributed to the word Nix being easy to search for. But even if everyone on HN is aware of what it is, that doesn't make it mainstream by any definition I can think of. There are countless examples in the world of things that most people (in a given audience) are aware of, but that almost none of them participate in.

Is Haskell mainstream? What about committing murder?

It is horrible searching for Nix stuff because of all the *nix stuff.

And yes, this is 100% Nix's fault

Your claim is that software doesn't go from non-mainstream into popular if it stays non-mainstream for a decade. I'm really not willing to discuss the definition of "mainstream", but there are plenty of cases of software that stayed a decade as "everybody knows it, nobody uses it" and eventually got popular.

> Well, Nix is mainstream. Evidence of that is that you can just talk about it by name here on HN without explaining what it is.

I would say that HN is far from mainstream.

COBOL is mainstream?