>I don't get that at all, NixOS is a fundamentally improved way of managing your operating system.

In what way? Why are functionally-declarative system configs good? What does the increased workload gain me over my usual list-of-packages-to-apt-get?

I can actually remember what's installed on my system and how it's configured in a centralised place, even when I don't touch the configuration for a few months. It's actually better for "boring" systems that I don't touch the config of much - "why is that set up like that" is a question I can easily answer. Additionally, when I do want to play with new stuff, the various tools I'm given usually let me do that and go back to a clean slate if I'm not interested, without having to deal with heavyweight containers/VMs/etc.

Yep, switching between KDE and GNOME or xorg and Wayland is so much easier than on other distributions.

All your state is in one place - packages and configuration. On a typical system there is tons of hidden state - some little option you had to change but didn't document, some package you forgot you installed ... that's not that easy to reproduce or change-track without backing up the whole system. You could use Ansible to do it, but that's another can of overhead.

... at least that's my experience.

> The only real reason not to use it

I am sorry but that is fanfiction that nix people want to believe. There are numerous reasons not to use nix, a few: - Incredibly smaller community - Incredibly smaller support from community and enterprise - Yet another programming language - that is difficult to grok

Those alone can kill any technically sound project, but there are lots of others. Such as slow installs, storage requirements etc.

I agree with the programming language, it seems to be more difficult than necessary, I don't get why the syntax had to be so outlandish.