Linux

I've been using it for over a year and love it. A config file for your entire system, and built in rollbacks anytime something goes wrong. One language to configure everything, although in practice that doesn't always work. But I love it.

Some others have started why it works, here is some how. Nixos completely disregards the fhs. Packages don't install to anywhere standard, every package and configuration change gets it's on directory in /nix/store but through smart use of tracking everything there, it symlinks all those files to proper places and sets up the environment for them to know where libraries are.

This is then also why you don't need sudo privileges to install things. Your profile has an environment that is aware of your users packages and configurations, the system itself isn't effected because everything is symlinked.

Then because every update means new directories in /nix/store you can role back to your last configuration because plasma broke something or whatever.

However, it's a LOT to learn. Best place I know of is https://piped.video/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&t=0

This guy did a good job for me. Hope this helps!

I tried it about a year ago and I don't know it did not convince me. Yeah it might be great for some niche developer oriented needs or deployment but for a normal OS usage, meh. I kind of see it as a current hype, just like crypto/NFT before, and AI now. For normal everyday usage I find openSUSE Tumblweed much more suitable and much more widely applicable.

I switched around one and a half years ago. I must say, there are some hurdles to using NixOS. Mainly I dislike that it always takes around 20 times the effort to start and project. You make up for the initial time investment, because you end up with a far more stable setup, but still it does take some willpower to get things started.

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

Answering that question fully would require a PHD thesis.

Perhaps you could narrow down your question a little?

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.

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

I'm using Void Linux and see no reason to move over to NixOS. The concept seems cool though.

SYMLINKS

SYMLINKS EVERYWHERE

(also 6000 packages intalled on my system for some reason lol)

Overlays. Good package management, and lot of stability stuff.

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

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

I don't get the hype. I'm staying with Arch, as Nix seems to be mainly for developers.