this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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And your extraordinary result after all that is… exactly what you would've gotten in a few minutes downloading another distro.
However, you then don't have to mentally remember every change you made when you eventually migrate to a new machine or replicate your setup across your laptop and desktop while keeping them synchronized. It takes me a few hours to setup and verify that everything is how I need on a normal distro, though that may be a byproduct of my system requirements. Re-patching and packaging kernel modules on Debian for odd hardware is not fun, nor is manually fixing udev and firewall rules for the same projects again and again.
I was mostly joking, of course. I appreciate the use case. It's just that 99% of people are spinning new machines once every decade. Having a reproducible setup is something of interest for a very narrow band of system managers.
I truly believe that for those who are spinning new hardware every day and need an ideal setup every time, a system image is far more practical. With much more robust tooling available. I've read other replies and for them all, I notice that using Universal Blue to package and deploy a system image would take a tiny fraction of the time it takes just learning Nix basic syntax. It's so niche it seems almost not worth any of the effort to learn.
Sometimes it's also the updates, rolling back a failed update is much simpler with Nix even if it took some elaborate set-up. This might be not wildly useful but it happens more often than spinning up a new machine entirely