Nix has the same problem as Terraform: it solves a lot of problems, but you have to 'live and breathe' their DSL.<p>You're no longer learning/maintaining Linux - you're learning and maintaining Nix.
> is it the alternative to Debian and Archlinux?<p>Is it <i>the</i> alternative?<p>For desktop or server?<p>NixOS will continue to be niche and continue to be <i>an</i> alternative.<p>For desktop, NixOS will continue to be a niche, like Arch and Gentoo, because of the learning curve. But if you're already running Arch Linux, NixOS is a step in a direction you do want to consider, but may not want to afford with your time.<p>For server, NixOS will also continue to be a niche. Using it both attracts talent and limits the talent pool, because lots of very capable DevOps and sysadmins just never got around to NixOS, even if they are veterans in both the classic and the cloud world. It's like making a startup with Haskell.<p>Also, I've been holding back on switching to NixOS, but I'm finally dedicating my next free weekend to install it on my laptop. I would love to be able to reproduce my exact working environment on new machines more easily. I'm not switching from Debian / Alpine on server any time soon.
I tried out NixOS the other day using the stable ISO image in a VM. To try to get some familiarity I tried to install a really simple package (neofetch). After the VM was stuck at 100% CPU for about 10 minutes I gave up.<p>Not sure if it was a cold start issue for the package manager or a quirk of using the live ISO versus an actual install but I was too demotivated to keep learning.
Can you use a one-line (or few-lines) declaration in that config file to setup a complete and updated GPU Tensorflow/Pytorch stack?<p>- Anyone in the know?
Betteridge's Law says no :)<p>"Declarative: in normal Linux distro you configure the operating system with a sequence of commands, "<p>No I pretty much can point and click the configuration of Debian XFCE.