It's debatable: it's easier a system that when it decide to upgrade can regularly lock you out in an "waiting" state for an unknown time until it hopefully finished without error then a system that you can re-deploy just with few lines of already written code?
It's easier a system that degrade while you use it, deriving to unknown states quickly or one you can rebuild and you normally do that upon any upgrade?
IMVHO Nix language is horrific, yes, that's a big issue and I dream Guix for that witch unfortunately it's not mature enough for my needs, but what NixOS offer:
- custom image to deploy just a simple .nix + oneliner away
- reproducibility
makes it far easier than any other system we have these days. Consider that the fact most people decide to make acrobatics on a blade simply ignoring the fact their system once installed, typically in a manual way, derive and degrade, keeping manually managing it fixing issues as they appear without even a real "backup plan" (at maximum having backups of personal data, witch are useless without the working OS) does means "easy" as "hey, it's easy not thinking, living day-to-day no matter what", yes it might be easy, until shit happen, when (not if) happen... Such easiness demand a potentially very big and up-front unknown price.
Thanks to NixOS I've upgraded many time my home infra, smoothly, I have everything up to date and everything can survive hw changes, crashes etc without much manual work in a reproducible manner. Oh, and that without wasting a gazillion of resources for things like ks and their obscenely long YAML-based setups, containers that are loooooong to rebuild to a point many simply do it once in a while etc.
Windows might sound simple for some because of ignorance: they already know it and only it, they get it pre-installed, when something happen they call for third party support etc, but that's not easiness that's habit+offloading problems to others. An easy recipe for disasters and hi opex + regular capex with much randomness.
In "complete" (desktop) terms classic systems were meant to last a decade of comfortable usage*, they were products with a significant value, mastered by the user/buyer of them; now systems last mostly only few years just to sell new and even more crappy hw, stating "hey, do not worry your data are secured on our servers, just pay us what we told you to pay, at our condition since you depend on us for anything".
