NixOS is not for the impatient. Maintaining your system configuration is an exercise in software development like any other - if you lack rigor or discipline, your codebase will become painful to work with. Nothing is ever one shell incantation away - it has to be carefully architected into the existing system.
That being said, once you get the hang of things, you reap amazing benefits:
- You can clone your system to any machine, and immediately have an identical environment
- You can share system configurations as code (declare the means for hosting a website in its repository, for example)
- You can use a fully-fledged programming language to configure any part of your system
- You can make use of an extensive ecosystem of easily composable, prebuilt NixOS modules
- You can seamlessly integrate with Nix, allowing for ephemeral development environments and shells with packages, eliminating much of the need for imperative package management
- Everything in a Nix-based system must be derived strictly from (lockfiled) inputs, making the reproducibility guarantees incredibly strong (barring any network errors or resources being taken down)
- The declarative nature of anything Nix-based means that every change is documented - your system never shifts from the source of truth, compared to other distros where discipline is required to maintain reproducibility
- Nix is so robust that you could even nuke your filesystems on every log out, if you'd like
That being said, once you get the hang of things, you reap amazing benefits:
- You can clone your system to any machine, and immediately have an identical environment
- You can share system configurations as code (declare the means for hosting a website in its repository, for example)
- You can use a fully-fledged programming language to configure any part of your system
- You can make use of an extensive ecosystem of easily composable, prebuilt NixOS modules
- You can seamlessly integrate with Nix, allowing for ephemeral development environments and shells with packages, eliminating much of the need for imperative package management
- Everything in a Nix-based system must be derived strictly from (lockfiled) inputs, making the reproducibility guarantees incredibly strong (barring any network errors or resources being taken down)
- The declarative nature of anything Nix-based means that every change is documented - your system never shifts from the source of truth, compared to other distros where discipline is required to maintain reproducibility
- Nix is so robust that you could even nuke your filesystems on every log out, if you'd like