I spent about 3-4 months learning Nix/OS this past spring/summer. After some trial and error and source code spelunking, I finally got my system working according to these two blog posts, with some tweaks [1]. It was a lot of work to ramp up that learning curve, but now that I have I don’t think I can ever go back to another standard Linux again. They all feel so messy and disorganized now by comparison.

[1]: Some things, notably containers like LXC/LXD, can’t work with tmpfs mounted to /var, /var has to be on disk, while the rest of / can be tmpfs.