As someone just getting into Nix and NixOS myself, I found one particular comment there offers an excellent summary after talking with a few others in person as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22891648
Essentially, after an initial investment of time for learning curve, the huge payoff comes when migrating to another machine because of system-wide configuration being reproduced with precision.
In my case, moving back and forth between laptop and desktop/workstation was a pain point with Xubuntu. A delta of less than one hour between `apt-get dist-upgrade` on two devices was enough to translate into divergence of versions in some packages.
We've come a long way since days of tsx-11, but I digress.
As someone just getting into Nix and NixOS myself, I found one particular comment there offers an excellent summary after talking with a few others in person as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22891648
Essentially, after an initial investment of time for learning curve, the huge payoff comes when migrating to another machine because of system-wide configuration being reproduced with precision.
In my case, moving back and forth between laptop and desktop/workstation was a pain point with Xubuntu. A delta of less than one hour between `apt-get dist-upgrade` on two devices was enough to translate into divergence of versions in some packages.
We've come a long way since days of tsx-11, but I digress.