I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.
For DevOps, it provides consistency for every CI run and production deployment, especially when a whole system needs to be shipped.
I’m always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.
Is your hardware always the exact same? Because if it isn’t, then I’m sure you have to do modifications to your config file. And at that point you night as well just use a regular distro instead.
You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple
nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host"and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).
