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by e3bc54b2 1711 days ago
Traditional systems have complexity too. Its just not up front.

I like to compare it to fossil fuels and global warming. Traditional systems get one started quick, but eventually build a large fragile system that gets harder to fix/rebuild the longer it goes on.

Nix is different, it forces you to do your work upfront. But once setup, you pretty much can (and to my attestation do) forget it is in place. You do have to learn setting a anything a and everything. But you only do it once. If the house burns down, you don't need to remember what you had. You don't need to remember what to setup in what order. You don't have to find out you forgot something in the middle of something else. In other words, the onus is no longer on you.

That last sentence is incredibly liberating. I stopped worrying having black screens after updates and pretty much stopped having rescue disc, because rescue functionality comes built in the system. It sounds cultish, and it kinda is, but as I said in previous comment on Nix, it is the worst system management tool, except all the others.