I'd say it's more like vim. Steep initial learning curve for a few months then it becomes pretty easy and indespensible. Perhaps Haskell is like this but I never got past the curve.
Are templated VMs contained within a few kilobytes of config files? Can anything in the entire system be included or excluding by tweaking these text files? Can it be used as a desktop on bare metal?
ZFS and BTRFS are orthogonal and often used in conjunction with Nix.
This person's main argument is that because Ansible can be used to accomplish some of the benefits (for some definition of accomplish) of NixOS, that NixOS isn't doing anything special or differentiating.
I also get a sense they are for some reason solely focused on cattle server use-cases. I'd say the OP (home infra) is in between your production servers and your PC.
I run my home infra as sort-of-cattle. Nothing that matters is stored solely on local disk. If my Mac were to die, I'd probably spend an hour or so waiting for Homebrew and asdf to install stuff, and I'd have to manually grab some files from GitHub. The worst case would be my Windows desktop dying, since I have nothing in the way of repeatability set up for, but all I use it for is Steam. Again, mostly just dealing with the annoyance of installing Windows and waiting for Steam to re-download a ton of games.
Conversely, I can lose a k8s node and have nothing change. If I lose my NAS (separate node, separate Proxmox cluster), I'd have to boot up the backup (which boots daily to sync, then shuts down) and run an Ansible play to change its IP address so that all the NFS targets still worked. I could make that more automated, I suppose, but it's an unlikely scenario so I'm fine with the small amount of manual labor.
I guess my point is that I don't see the benefit in having a special OS for daily use. If I want to fiddle around and possibly break things, I don't want to be doing that on the device I use daily. I used Gentoo for years in the early 2000s, and no longer have the time or patience for my main computer breaking constantly. If I want to play with something, I spin up a VM. If I want to play with something baremetal, I have an old Dell T310 I can use, and a couple of ancient Macbooks somewhere.
This is what I love about NixOS users - how belligerently defensive y'all get immediately when someone pokes at your project.
> Are templated VMs contained within a few kilobytes of confif [sic] files?
Not kilobytes, but Proxmox supports sparse images so pretty small. More importantly, disk space is cheap as hell, and I value my time way more than a couple of hundred megs of space.
> Can anything in the entire system be included or excluding by tweaking these text files?
Personally I template my images with Ansible, so yes in fact anything can be included or excluded with a text file.
> Can it be used as a desktop on bare metal?
Who cares? The performance hit from a modern Type 1 hypervisor is so small as to only matter if you're also the kind of person who is tweaking obscure CFLAGS for emerge, which is to say it doesn't matter.
> ZFS and BTRFS are orthogonal
Only in that they aren't an OS, obviously, but they perform the same function (rollback) that you mentioned as a positive point for NixOS.
> Who cares? The performance hit from a modern Type 1 hypervisor is so small as to only matter if you're also the kind of person who is tweaking obscure CFLAGS for emerge, which is to say it doesn't matter.
I want to use it as my personal computer...using a VM seems even more fringe and niche than NixOS there lol. And for a home network, VM also seems overkill.
I suppose there are also network effects at play. If you use NixOS for a laptop and desktop, suddenly using it for home infra is actually more economical than using other tools.
So use a templated VM, or a filesystem with easy snapshotting like ZFS or BTRFS.
The former also allows for easy provisioning of new machines, and doesn't lock you down to a single OS.