I used nix years ago on a Mac just as a sort of alternative to what I’d otherwise use homebrew for and I really liked it, so I decided a few times that i would try nixos for my laptop. Each time I was stopped by the awful documentation and the weird “flakes are experimental but kinda required” state of the project and I gave up.

This year I decided to give it another try and set it up on an ancient laptop using Claude to factor the config and it’s gone so well that I now use the same nix config to manage three different machines and it’s insanely liberating to know how easy it is to screw everything up and roll it back trivially. I now regularly make edits on one machine and then just routinely commit them and go apply on the other machines with zero friction. It’s kind of amazing.