[goblins]

Never heard of this one, popped over to the website. Literally the only thing I understand is that the name is NixOS which uses the Nix package manager.

They'd need to dumb down whatever it is they're talking about significantly before I would use it, can't make heads nor tails of it.

[mbrock]

I'm brainwashed already so it's hard for me to see it from the perspective of a new user.

Here are some main points from the website:

NixOS has a completely declarative approach to configuration management: you write a specification of the desired configuration of your system in NixOS’s modular language, and NixOS takes care of making it happen.

NixOS has atomic upgrades and rollbacks. It’s always safe to try an upgrade or configuration change: if things go wrong, you can always roll back to the previous configuration.

That makes sense, doesn't it? Is it that you want a more detailed explanation of how it achieves this, and how it differs from other distributions?

Did you see this page? https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

[goblins]

I'm not adverse to messing with config files but this seems a little above my knowledge base.

I've no experience with functional programming so have no idea really how it's doing the things it's doing. Plus I can imagine writing out your config file would take a long time.

What does declarative mean? What does atomic mean?

[hackermailman]

The orig PhD thesis paper is what you want http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf

I use GuixSD, just because it's init system is in Scheme(guile) and the declarative syntax of system config and pkg definitions seem more straight forward to me and I prefer free software. You can easily run a GuixSD system with a mainline kernel if you want proprietary firmware blobs but so far I haven't had any issues with the default Libre kernel. There's a GuixSD presentation here http://dustycloud.org/misc/talks/guix/chicagolug_2015/guix_t...