NixOS' infamous learning curve has an undersung sweet spot. I recently discovered a bit of a ‘vlog’ (the video part is just a static image) describing NixOS from the perspective of a self-described, impatient, fickle hacker, which I think testifies to this very well. It begins:

> I am not a smart man. The difference between success and failure to me, is razor thin. I am impatient. I am hubristic. I am easily bored. I have it in my to be tenacious, but it has to be drawn out by reward at the end. And NixOS ticks all these boxes for me, in a way that other systems really don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-TRCpDizA

I think it's worth listening to as it is, but below, I've tried to condense and summarize the parts of that 30-minute video most relevant to that point, for folks to whom the pacing of a relaxed, rambly, personal monologue does not appeal.

> I'll give you an example. All my systems have the same set of installed programs now. Now that seems real simple. Y'know, they all say, let's say, `screen`, or `tmux, or they all have Ardour, or they all have the same Emacs configuration. I know that sounds basic, but that has never happened to me before [laughs]! I'm just too easily bored [smiles] to invent such a thing that would make it possible for me to do that. [...] System configuration, instead of being this laundry list of chores to be done, becomes a programming exercise. I'm comfortable with programming exercises. I do not like chores.

> [...]

> The integration between Nix the language, Nix the package manager, and NixOS the operating system means that I'm not required to invent very much. [...] Everything I just described to you, I could have done 15 years ago, with systems like Puppet [or] Ansible[.] [...] However, while using those systems, I am required to make choices about how things are done. And those choices really have some stop[ping] energy to them. Some of the choices are so low-level that they're uninteresting, and it becomes rather boring rather quickly to do [something like] Puppet or Ansible. ‘Where is this `authorized_keys` file supposed to go?’ I don't really care! [laughs] I just want [...] to be able to log into that system.

> On top of all that, where [with NixOS, it feels like] I'm just motoring along [unimpeded]— I'm creating a configuration very quickly that rewards [rather than drains] me— at the end of it, I can share that configuration with someone else in a meaningful, even executable, way. And the way to execute it is well-understood. There's no trickery [hidden in the deployment environment]. This is also [supposedly] the same with Puppet and Ansible, but somehow, no one seems to do it! You don't see people sharing Ansible configurations. This culture of sharing configuration, of sharing declarative statements about builds, is something that is [...] in quantity and quality, unique to NixOS.

> I recently heard from a friend [...] who somehow saw my videos [on NixOS]. [...] We never spoke about NixOS before I heard from him [about this]. But he took the configuration that I'd put up on GitHub, [...] made a couple of changes to it, and he got one system up and running. And he said ‘Wow, that was easy!’. This guy has been doing [Unix and Linux systems administration] for 25 years, and I can't imagine that he's ever done such a thing before. [I can't imagine that he has ever] just walked up to some repository, and [simultaneously] had [...] the inclination, the confidence, and the ability to repeat a build [of it] on his own system. [...] He actually said to me at some point, ‘What have you done to me?’ [laughs]. Of course, I didn't do anything. He's well on his way to converting all of his other systems to NixOS.

> [...]

> I think [Nix's features] sort of feed into each other, as a [...] virtuous cycle. Like I said: I am not a smart man, I am not a patient man. I can be tenacious, but it really takes me feeling like I'm gonna get something at the end. [...] [W]ith Nix, I don't feel like I'm wasting my time, I find myself— surprisingly!— getting to the bottom of issues that I could have gotten to the bottom of on Ubuntu, or Manjaro, or Fedora, or whatever else I was using, [but never did]. I could have fixed them there, but man, the reward for doing so was just minimal.

> [...]

> [That's because] first of all, if you're not running a configuration management system, and you have to do it manually on every system... that is really boring to have to do. So the answer is to run a configuration management system. But the configuration management tools that are available for these systems are [...] just me typing, except automated. [...] There are sort of [declarations], but they definitely have an order. And you have to know the order, you have to control the order. In the NixOS stuff, I'm not concerned about order. [...] Nix uses `bash`, under the hood, so of course I'm [actually] running bash­— yeah, sure. But I'm not [thinking about it] very often.

> People have anticipated the kinds of things I wanna do in [the] Nix [world;] I just reuse whatever they did. It is [admittedly] a game of inches here. I often found myself in a place, with my other systems, where all of them were configured completely differently. I just didn't bother with configuration management stuff. It's not like I haven't used configuration management tools. I use them all the time. [I use them] at work and stuff, but for my own systems, it just seemed like ‘ugh’. It was like going to work! [...] ‘Ok, now I'm back at work, and I have to name these steps.’ It's dull. It's boring.

> [But] now that I have Nix[OS], I'm getting to the bottoms of these stupid issues, like [...] fixing my computer's sleep. Even though I would have had to do exactly the same thing on Ubuntu or Manjaro or Fedora, or any of that stuff— it's the same system— but I actually do it now. Because I'm like ‘Okay, fine. I can write this down once [and for all].’ NixOS has nudged me over the edge of feeling like I'm not wasting my time [...] and that makes me tend to get to the bottoms of issues. Success [now] more often seems possible than impossible. Before, it just seemed impossible, like

> > I am never gonna get this under control. I am just gonna live with chaos.

> [laughs] Everyone has chaos. But in this game of inches, NixOS has just pushed me over the edge that little bit, to where I have things working that I've never had working before. Some concrete examples:

> - I can bring up a new system with the vast majority of configuration that I actually use in 20 minutes. [...] (20 minutes would be a long time, actually. I would have to make a couple mistakes.)

> - [Due to random differences in sleep behavior, mDNS configuration, and God knows what, before] it was always a crapshoot when I'd type `ssh some-host-name` whether I'd actually get in. [...] Now that all of these systems share the same configuration, that hasn't happened to me.

> - I can print from any system. I know it sound stupid. But yes! I don't print often, but when I wanna print, I just wanna print. That was never possible in my old configurations. I'd always have to [fuck] around with printing.

> - I can shut the lid on any of my laptops that are connected to external monitors... and the won't go to sleep. I know, I know— it seems stupid, but it's true! I figured it out. [Thanks to NixOS], I put enough time into that to fix it.

> - I can shut the lid on laptops not connected to external monitors, and they do go to sleep. They go to sleep! They don't just sit there [...] [shining] the monitor light on the keyboard for two hours, running down my battery. [...] It's because I was rewarded [along the way] when I put the time in.

> - I can carry around [...] an external ZFS-formatted drive, and I can plug it into any of these systems and mount it. It can even be encrypted!

> - Once I log in, I can send and receive Keybase messages on any of these [5] systems.

> - I can use my stupid Roland looper on any of these systems. [NixOS encouraged me to] put the time in to add the kernel patch that it requires.

> - I can use an old build of a package— built years ago— to solve dependency bitrot. The current version of a package I use will not build. But I can transport myself back in time, just for that one.

> Another thing I noticed while I was asking questions in various support channels for NixOS is that it somehow also happens to have a really excellent community. I haven't seen this kind of community in many other places. I saw it (way back in the day) with Python. And before then, [laughs] I think the only other place I've seen it was on bulletin board systems. There's unreal politeness, and humility, and thoughtfulness, and thoroughness on all of the support channels I can think of— Discourse, Matrix, IRC, GitHub. [...] There's no ‘RTFM’, there's nobody flexing there. [...] It is the default [on the Internet] to see people flexing and being assholes in support [...] but there's none of that in the NixOS community. [...] It is astounding to me. How did it happen? [In the NixOS community], everybody is smarter than I am. Everyone. I love that!

> [...]

> Once you give [NixOS] a fair shake, you will not go back to something else. [...] The idea that you would look at NixOS, use it for a month, and then be like ‘eh, idk, I'll go back to Fedora’... I don't see that happening to many people. My mind would be blown by that happening.