I've been maintaining homelab servers for two decades, used all kinds of IaC approaches etc.

Switched to NixOS a few years ago, and I can't overstate the amount of peace it has brought to my life. It just takes so much stress away, compared to everything else I've used before.

My only criticism is that the Nix language is not super ergonomic or easy to learn. But with LLMs nowadays, even that is barely ever a problem.

Same. As someone who is OK with a small amount of maintenance every N months, but keeps forgetting how things are setup or what I did, moving absolutely everything into Nix and running NixOS made things a hell of a lot simpler when you come back after 6 months and can easily find where and what to change, as long as you take care to declaratively set things up via Nix as much as possible, and use git.

Helps that things are really easy to test too, spin up a new test VM with your new config and copy of real data, check if it works, then apply the change to the real hardware and you're good to go. Alternatively, do it live with a copy of real data, then rollback in case it doesn't work.

Options still get deprecated in NixOS and require working around, and while debugging has gotten easier it can be a pain to debug when there’s an error somewhere deep in your configs. I’ve found that NixOS is like 0 maintenance most months and then half a Saturday two or three times a year figuring out why I can’t update.

The same with NixOS and in production. Even less than 15 minutes month.