[jon-wood]

I love the slightly weird learning curve on NixOS where initially it seems incredibly complex writing this weird functional programming language for every change you want to apply to your system, then over time it clicks and you end up in a place where any operating system that doesn't define everything in a weird functional programming language seems incredibly complex. I read blog posts about doing things on other distros now and I'm left thinking that an 800 word set of instructions would be 25 lines of Nix expressions.

[data-ottawa]

When I started self hosting last year it seemed insane that hosting a service required separately managing the imperative firewall state, vpn, container runner, systemd, and reverse proxy.

Nixos is nice because it just works. When I do a rebuild switch it will take down my affected services gracefully, apply the updates, update my firewall, and start the container all automatically and declaratively.

Plus the owning account and file permissions are explicit so it’s impossible to forget you ran chmod/crown on some script and now your service is over-permissioned.

It’s not magic but it feels like magic because it works so easily and reliably.

[anon291]

I've find my email on simple-nixos-mailserver for almost a half decade... So easy, less than 25 lines of code and a command line to update every few months.

[mattmein]

This is the concept of Simple vs Easy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768107

[rekoros]

yes, exactly!

[1-more]

it's like reading instructions for using a GUI program (open this dialog, click this checkbox, fill in this value) vs copying and pasting a complex FFMpeg command