I grew tired of the OS I used most of my life, Ubuntu. I fear updates. I used to like fixing things and tinkering, now I want my OS to just work with as few problems as possible. Is NixOS good for this, or does the happy path require me to like tinkering and fixing broken things?
For me it was a big upfront time investment. I managed to get nixos installed and my programs mostly configured, and then along the way I learned more and realized my prior setup was somewhat dumb so I refactored it. This process has happened at least 4 times. But now I feel like I get it, and can update and configure all of my machines from my one laptop, using one repo of flakes.
I enjoyed learning nix/nixos in stages like that, otherwise I don’t think it would have clicked. I’m pretty sure I’m going to repeat the same process a few more times as I’m by no means yet a nix expert.
While I’m not tinkering with my setup, I absolutely love how I can install and try new projects easily, including getting a working dev environment going painlessly for almost any stack.