[gamacodre]

Strongly agree. In the last three years I've rebuilt my macOS laptop from scratch twice (dead hard drive, and a dev tool run amok), and once swapped it for a different size because I really wanted the larger battery.

My co-workers were appalled, but I had less than a day of downtime each time. With continuous backup to an external drive (always on while I'm working), a password manager I can also store certs in, and keeping everything important in a cloud-backed git repo, there isn't a single thing on my work computer that's hard to replace. It's been fantastic.

[mkingston]

Nix is one part of the solution to this problem. About a year ago I lost my data to a corrupt file system. I tried to recover it for some time, eventually gave up, and was back to a working machine, with all the software installed and configured as it had been previously, within two hours of a disk wipe. Most of that time was waiting while nix downloaded and installed packages from the internet.

[pdimitar]

I wish I could easily find beginner-friendly Nix tutorials. Even the official ones immediately assume you know their terminology.

Do you have any good links?

[mkingston]

Nix Pills was the "standard" intro text I started with a couple of years ago. At the end, you'll be able to navigate packaging with Nix in general, even if you're a little unfamiliar with some of the modern idioms and tools. It's very approachable, not especially short, not especially long.

https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/