[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?