Comment by ameixaseca

I've used too many Linux distributions to list here, last one before NixOS being Arch.

No disto ever came close to giving me what NixOS gives:

- I can try to rebuild my system as many times as I want and it doesn't matter if it fails, as long as I get one to succeed I can switch to it;

- Once I get the system the way I want, I can reproduce the same setup with a single command across a number of different machines;

- I can reuse different parts of the config with different machines and update things incrementally, revision, etc, and every time I improve my shared config on one machine, the improvements are automatically transferred to the other machines upon gir-pull and rebuild.

I've now transfered most of my previous configuration to Nix, and not only that but I have tons of services I never bothered configuring on all machines enabled since it was all this trouble of moving configs back and forth.

I've got my share of issues with Nix, from trying to use submodules with Flakes (nixos-install does not work with it) to tons of headaches when trying to play with specializations - most of the time issues were caused by not understanding how the evaluation works or how to properly abstracting modules - but I cannot imagine myself going back to a regular Linux distribution ever again.