Re:Containers Are Not the Future
by ghostwriter on Thursday March 19, 2020 @03:49PM
(#22630939)
I'd say NixOS probably is not the right entry point if you are looking for a softer learning experience. NixOS is built on top of Nixpkgs package manager, which itself could be thought of as a side-effect of Nix - the DSL and a runtime for building software from source in a reproducible manner. If you start by learning how to employ Nix-the-build-tool in your daily software development practices, you will be amazed how little you need to learn in order to be productive with it, because there's essentially just one new concept - a derivation [1], the rest are just community-driven infrastructure and utility methods on top of it.
[1] https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/our-first-derivation.html#...
Have you seen project atomic?
Seems like it would align pretty well with your vision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS
Unfortunately these tend to be overly complex and have too steep of a learning curve, and they don't address all the issues.
The closest is probably apps on mobile, but again that doesn't address all the issues and comes with a whole set of restrictions that are very problematic outside small single-user devices.