Yep, exactly the same experience as me. The fact that everything is declarative and revertible means that I'm much "braver" than I would be with virtually any other Linux.

An example I have given before, but there was a weird quirk with my ThinkPad with Linux, where with USB keyboards, if I hadn't been typing for more than a minute, it would have to "wake up" for about four seconds, so I'd lose the first couple words that I was typing.

Fixing this involved playing with a few boot parameters, which can be scary to play with on something like Ubuntu. The issue is annoying, but nothing I can't live with, so if I were on Ubuntu or something I probably would have just tried to live with it, but because it's NixOS, I realized that the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation, so I did a few experiments with boot parameters and fixed it.

I've ditched M$, switched to NixOS last month and I feel like I don't hate computers again. Shouldn't have procrastinated this for so long. All other operating systems feel so silly to use now (at least when they aren't anxiety- and rage-inducing).

> Another underappreciated feature about NixOS is, that you can create a VM out of a NixOS config to locally test a server update/deployment.

And similarly, you can generate a bootable ISO of your NixOS config. It's really nice for both testing things out and also as a recovery mechanism. Rather than booting some generic ISO, connecting to the internet, installing whatever recovery tools and filesystem drivers I need, and then doing the recovery, I can boot an ISO that is identical to my main system, with all my favorite recovery tools pre-installed.

Ohh I didnt know that, but it makes sense that you would be able to create an ISO, good tip!

You can similarly create a docker image from a nix config. It's quite beautiful, nix is impressive.

I self host my own stuff in a data center with a bunch of computers. I have a virtualized setup all in nix defining nixos setups for all hosts. Switches are virtualized using open v switch and everything is made so that the nix expression generates a launch script to test the whole set up.

Before I deploy I know that all hosts will be able to boot properly from tftp and then communicate and launch kubernetes.

I never ssh into any of my nodes at this point. Amazing. It just works. Once in a while I'll restart them just for funsies.

That sounds fascinating. Do you have public facing configuration you would be willing to share? :)

It's a bit messy and gives away too many details of my setup (including IP addresses and such). I'll see if I can eventually release something like it. I've thought of developing a tool that lets you auto-generate network topologies and such. My main use case is testing failovers with switches.