> but it does remove any fear of installing software overwriting files you wanted, including OS level (and kernel) upgrades.
I understand that's "true" in a theoretical way because the store is read-only and it is all hashed. But the hashes aren't routinely checked by some kind of hypervisor, and root can still overwrite things in the store.
The "fear of installing software overwriting files you wanted" essentially comes down to config file management (unhappy accidents) and malware.
You should have config file management in git already, so I don't feel like NixOS needs to solve that. I was hoping it would solve the problem of random software being able to obtain root and not ransomware me, but it practically doesn't solve that any better than any other distro.
I want to be missing something. I've invested a lot of time learning about Nix for the last week and my system is finally working, but I just got to the sandboxing/security portion of my install and the threat model seems broken.
I understand that's "true" in a theoretical way because the store is read-only and it is all hashed. But the hashes aren't routinely checked by some kind of hypervisor, and root can still overwrite things in the store.
The "fear of installing software overwriting files you wanted" essentially comes down to config file management (unhappy accidents) and malware.
You should have config file management in git already, so I don't feel like NixOS needs to solve that. I was hoping it would solve the problem of random software being able to obtain root and not ransomware me, but it practically doesn't solve that any better than any other distro.
I want to be missing something. I've invested a lot of time learning about Nix for the last week and my system is finally working, but I just got to the sandboxing/security portion of my install and the threat model seems broken.