KIKingMachiavelli·Feb 19, 2022
I used Arch for a long time but I always find that I couldn't keep a consistent configuration across multiple machines. The machine I used most often would quickly grow numerous augmentations and changes that I would be missing on my laptop and desktop. There are tools like etckeeper and numerous dotfile managers but most lacked the capability to recognize the machine's state/hardware (e.g. laptop, desktop, server, etc.) or only managed dotfiles but not /etc.
Overtime the best configuration tended to be just using the defaults because getting used to a tmux.conf on one machine would just become an annoyance one I was on a machine without it. (Plus now you need to use about 12 different configuration languages :))
A huge advantage Nix has over any other configuration tool is that is a single source of truth. A normal dotfiles repo doesn't
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know anything about the actual programs or OS so it's very easy for it to become incompatible with a machine's actual state.
On Nix, tools like home-manager [1] especially when used in a flake-template like devos [2] just solves this problem really well. It's very easy to make a change, switch to the new configuration, and then commit the change. Managing bespoke services and scripts is very easy because one file in Nix can create a service with a script's contents, create a user, install necessary packages, etc.
I think (desktop) Linux is partly a niche market because the management can be very complex. Nix is certainly very complex itself but its structured enough that it can create very simple systems. There are already several NixOS based OS's that are basically just configuration templates. I could certainly see a more user-friendly distro being released using Nix as the foundation.
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
[2] https://github.com/divnix/devos