> Also, once you used NixOS for a little while, it's very hard to go back to, let's say, Debian, Ubuntu, or Archlinux : manually configuring things in multiple configuration files in /etc seems really primitive.
I don't use nixos, but I use ansible to configure my desktop and homeserver environments. Completely different approach but same result in the end.
I am aware than Nix has so many other benefits but I'm talking about configuration management in particular.
> Completely different approach but same result in the end.
Well if you lock everything down with hashes, maybe in some sense, but other than declaring your configuration in a text file and deploying software with it, it's pretty much different (imperative approach with side effects everywhere, vs functional declarative approach).
* Nix being a real programming language (and thus allows far better composition, and abstraction)
* You can run any configuration you want, and easily jump between configurations (e.g. rollback), advantage of being stateless (well obviously to a degree, as a lot of software itself creates state, but normally you're not jumping between multiple major versions of the same software anyway).
* Great caching as every built derivation is cached in `nix/store`, thus only things get rebuild, that are actually changed
With Ansible you may achieve something similar, but afaik require way more setup and discipline to keep it clean, and the "programming" in Ansible feels rather painful, if you're used to a real (functional) programming language.
> With Ansible you may achieve something similar, but afaik require way more setup and discipline to keep it clean, and the "programming" in Ansible feels rather painful, if you're used to a real (functional) programming language.
Not to mention that templating a language that uses spaces for logic (YAML) is just useless amounts of pain for no good reason.
I used Ansible in the past for the exact same purpose and it has one major flaw: Ansible is imperative. What I mean is: if I add a line in a config file and want to rollback then I have to manually handle revert (create playbooks with `delete` flag etc.) With Nix you get this for free.
Also, with Nix you can trivially create image for your configuration (even with slightly different options, e.g. only enable ssh on 0.0.0.0 for a fresh install, but disable it after first config apply) which I find useful when working with a cloud.
I don't use nixos, but I use ansible to configure my desktop and homeserver environments. Completely different approach but same result in the end.
I am aware than Nix has so many other benefits but I'm talking about configuration management in particular.