Man I'm so interested in the whole Nix/NixOS ecosystem but it makes me feel new to Linux again even though I've been using it daily for over a decade

edit: in a "I have no idea what I'm doing" kind of way

yeah, i actually don't use nix but i've been thinking a lot about moving to it. you essentially declare the stuff you need and the way apps are installed makes it so that it avoids dependency hell. this is a very niche thing though, since it's essentially nixos without systemd (which makes it super unstable and essentially needs a lot of user fiddling) but a very interesting idea.

Is it me, or is it kinda of odd that nixOS did not go full on nix with the init system? For example, setting up service with nix. Obviously systemd is fine for for me (please do not flame me systemd haters), but I wonder if the nix team thought of this idea.

Guix.

Try Guix. It's great.

i kind of understand it, tho, if you're kind of reinventing something you want to use infrastructure that's already built as much as you can to focus development on the thing you're actually working on. we should be really grateful it even exists in the first place since it's not an easy task to build all of what the nix project is today. but well, of course one can always think of an even more efficient, better, perfect, more stable OS.