[pjmlp]

For me it is another Gentoo.

I had my time trying every new distro that would be popping up on Linux related magazines CD/DVDs up to the mid-2000's (they still do in some European countries), unless it comes on a laptop I can get at the mall computer store, or some customer imposes it on our delivery contract, not really something I want to give a chance to.

[pxc]

> I had my time trying every new distro that would be popping up on Linux related magazines CD/DVDs up to the mid-2000's

Me, too! That was a blessed part of my childhood and adolescence.

You're not entirely wrong about the comparison to Gentoo, but I do think NixOS is more practical than Gentoo.

[watusername]

> some customer imposes it on our delivery contract

It's happening: Companies are adopting Nix [0] and you may see such requirement come up some time.

[0]: https://github.com/ad-si/nix-companies

[pjmlp]

In the bubble I live on, classical VMs have become the exception nowadays, containers and serverless deployments are the rule now.

I am yet to see any classical VM deployment isn't one variation of Debian, Ubuntu, Red-Hat, SuSE.

Note how that list has a certain startup feeling to the company list, not boring big corp.

[watusername]

> In the bubble I live on, classical VMs have become the exception nowadays, containers and serverless deployments are the rule now.

Nix does not require NixOS, and I would even wager that in corporate dev environments it's most often used in a standalone manner.

You can install Nix on Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat, get a reproducible local dev environment and build reproducible OCI images that can be deployed to K8S/Cloud Run/Fargate/etc [0], without ever touching NixOS.

[0]: https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-and-running-docker-...

[pjmlp]

Yeah, but I would I want to advocate that to customer IT teams that never saw it on their lives, wish them good luck and jump ship?

[stackskipton]

Even if classical VM deployment, I still see a ton of containers. Like our database servers Ansible playbook which run Ubuntu are "Setup OS, mount disks, install docker apt repos, install stable docker, run container.

So Nix would let us avoid the Ansible playbook by just installing the Nix file but Ansible playbook is extremely rock solid so it feels like a problem we don't have. Also, we do pay for support for Cassandra to someone and while they officially would support us running on Nix, it's clear their support technicians are much more comfortable with RH or Debian based systems.

[zylent]

Arista, D.E. Shaw, Google are boring big corp

Several of those companies (replit) are building their business on nix.

With nix, even containers are optional.

[pjmlp]

From those I only know Google and replit, which is still kind of unicorn, and most businesses will never be 1% of Google size.

[zylent]

The others are big, trust me.

My point was that some businesses are tying their destiny to nix - in my experience this is a sign that an open-source project will gain corporate benefactors keeping it afloat + making it safer for others to adopt.

[codethief]

To me Gentoo vs. NixOS is like night and day. Building an entire system from scratch only takes you a few minutes in Nix, whereas with Gentoo you'll likely still be compiling X tomorrow night.