[secure]

Welcome to Linux!

I agree that through the lens of “how much time do you save?”, automating a NixOS installation is not worth it. As you describe, it’s just a few interactive commands in the upstream installer.

But from the perspective of “how much effort is it to spin up a new VM for this new project / task?”, spending the extra few minutes on building the fully automated installation path is well worth it. Also consider the perspective of “how many steps does it take to recover this VM in a disaster scenario?”, where reducing the manual steps to a minimum is very helpful.

BTW, the maintenance of the installer is virtually free: The configuration I show is the configuration I use in NixOS as well, so that needs to be updated anyway. Aside from that, to rebase my installer from NixOS 24.11 to NixOS 25.05, I just changed a number. When setting up a new machine, I can either download the upstream installer and write it to a USB stick, or I can change a number, rebuild (< 2 minutes) and write to a USB stick. Really not much difference.