Second that. I’m glad RPis are finally supported.

I really liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y - step by step, with examples and great explanations. Warning: it’s long, but I watched it in one session.

Declarative configuration of services and the rest of the entire system, and everything that brings with it.

• Want to test some new service, or make changes to an existing one, but don’t know if you want to keep it? Sure, just temporarily switch to the new configuration, you can always switch back to the old one and everything will be back as it was.
• Have multiple servers and want to share configuration between them? Absolutely, just import the same file from both. I have a git repo storing configurations for 10 machines and a huge part of it is shared configuration.
• Want to use one service’s endpoint (such as a socket path) in another? Sure, just use the socket path configuration option for the first service in the configuration for the second, such as here. This works since everything is a single tree of options which all the service configuration files are then generated from, so interpolate stuff as you wish.
• Checks for configuration correctness during build of the system (NixOS options are type checked during evaluation, and then during the actual system build there’s more checks, like nginx config has to succeed nginx -t, otherwise the system build fails and you can’t switch to it)
• Want to spin up a VM to test changes before putting it on the actual target? There’s a builtin command (nixos-rebuild build-vm) that makes a script that starts a QEMU VM with your configuration running in it. It’s as fast as building the real system, so a couple seconds if you’re making small changes.
• Setting up services is also often as easy as putting services.foo.enable = true; in your configuration. And, if you remove that line, the service is gone, so you’re never left with “the random package or file you installed once to test something and has been forgotten about”. That’s the biggest thing it has over any kind of imperative solution IMO.

I feel like even if I want to distro hop again and end up putting something else on my desktop, NixOS is going to stay on my servers indefinitely. It’s pretty much a perfect fit for servers.

It isn’t, it’s just different. I use NixOS because of stupid easy rollbacks, which is great for experimenting in production, and its declarative nature, which is great in a server setting.

Everything is declared, from packages to configuration, and then I can put it in a git repo locked to versions. If something breaks on updates, you have free rollbacks. Which means you can’t screw up too much. Also it has almost all the software.

It’s more that like 60% of my web traffic is Safari so I want to make sure it works for those people.

I have just learned about Ubuntu Christian Edition.

I felt the exact same way. So many comments online told me that running Arch as a home NAS was insane, but after the Jupiter Broadcasting guys did it without much issue, I decided to give it a go and was pleasantly surprised. I think if most of your stuff is running in Docker and you have BTRFS snapshots for your root filesystem, the system’s pretty much bullet proof. The rolling updates also mean you’ll never have huge upgrade cycles that are a pain in the ass to migrate to. You’re always just dealing with small manageable fires instead of large complicated ones and that’s a plus.

Exactly. That’s ultimately why I skipped Debian and went with Ubuntu

That’s pretty cool!

The inclusion of non-free by default was what was unclear to me from the website. Knowing that now, I’ll likely give Debian a spin next time I need an install.