[pmarreck]

Imagine installing an entirely new window manager without issue, and then undoing it without issue.

NixOS does that. And I'm pretty sure that no other flavor of Linux does. First time I realized I could just blithely "shop around window managers" simply by changing a couple of configuration lines, I was absolutely floored.

NixOS is the first Linux distro that made me actually feel like I was free to enjoy and tinker with ALL of Linux at virtually no risk.

There is nothing else like it. (Except Guix. But I digress.)

[tombert]

Completely agree; being able to transparently know what the system is going to do by just looking at a few lines of text is sort of game-changing. It's trivial to add and remove services, and you can be assured that you actually added and removed them, instead of just being "pretty sure" about it.

Obviously this is just opinion (no need for someone to supply nuance) but from my perspective the NixOS model is so obviously the "correct" way of doing an OS that it really annoys me that it's not the standard for every operating system. Nix itself is an annoying configuration language, and there are some more arcane parts of config that could be smoothed over, but the model is so obviously great that I'm willing to put up with it. If nothing else, being able to trivially "temporarily" install a program with nix-shell is a game-changer to me; it changes the entire way of how I think about how to use a computer and I love it.

Flakes mostly solve my biggest complaint with NixOS, which was that it was kind of hard to add programs that weren't merged directly into the core nixpkgs repo.

[pmarreck]

> but from my perspective the NixOS model is so obviously the "correct" way of doing an OS that it really annoys me that it's not the standard for every operating system

- Literally every person who's read the Nix paper and drank the kool-aid thinks this lol.

I STILL don't completely understand every element of my nix config but it's still quite usable. Adding software requires adding it to the large-ish config file, largely because I created overlay namespaces of "master.programname", "unstable.programname" and "stable.programname" (with the default being "unstable" in my case) but those would all ideally be moved out into 2 text files, 1 for system level (maybe called system_packages.txt) and one for a named user (perhaps called <username>_packages.txt) and if those could be imported somehow into the configuration.nix, I think that would make things a bit easier for end-users, at least initially.

The commandline UI (even the newer `nix` one) could still use an overhaul IMHO. The original CL utils were CLEARLY aimed directly at Nix developers, and not so much at end-users...

I've been working on my own wrapper to encapsulate the most common use-cases I need the underlying TUI for https://github.com/pmarreck/ixnay < and that's it so far.