Comment by slyall

There are a bunch of ways to manage bare metal servers apart from Nix. People have been doing it for years. Kickstart, theforeman, maas, etc, [0]. Many to choose from according to your needs and layers you want them to manage.

Reality is these days you just boot a basic image that runs containers

[0] Longer list here: https://github.com/alexellis/awesome-baremetal