People love Nix because of the OS configuration based around a single config file. Essentially, you define your system configuration in this file, including installed programs, then you rebuild your system based on that configuration.

The beauty here is that you can easily move this file to another machine running NixOS and reproduce your configuration there. You can also roll back changes by simply rebooting and choosing the last known good build and you're back in business.

I ran it in a VM for several months and was underwhelmed. Sticking with Fedora.

It's been around for like a decade, but was recently make more approachable by offering a graphical installer.

For those who like a video format, I found this introduction quite informative.

Never tried NixOS but I think I will try Qubes-Whonix next: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes

Glancing over the website, I thought it's an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue. I could imagine that it might be cool to use with Ansible and stuff. But for an average user? I can't really see the advantages in respect to the work you have to put in.

I'm really not sure of where this would be anymore usefull than a simple bash script to install all packages you need since it doesn't do configs and that rollbacks are supported by some filesystems already. Also Having version specific dependencies is already a thing for flatpacks and such

because it's good as hell and i don't want to have to spend time having to rebuild and reconfigure fresh OS installs or risk breakage when I could just use a config file that I know already works