Nix and NixOS users and experts: can you please explain to me why this 20+ year old technology has become the new hot thing in the last few years? I understand that we're dealing with interesting tech here, but I'd like to hear what's different now/recently.
The peripheral technologies are in the state that make it feasible (git platforms, CDNs, storage cost on local machine, internet speed,...)
There is a need/hype about atomic distros and reproducible builds. I would say latter is more important as things like docker or apptainer cannot provide full reproducibility. This reproducibility is handy in software development and especially in #ReproducibleResearch .
@JoeRess I found it because I had new hardware and needed bleeding edge kernels. I've always been a Fedora and Ubuntu guy, I like stability and didn't want to learn Arch. In NixOS using the latest upstream kernel is a single line in the config, and it's never broken.
Momentum & Critical Mass. Nixpkgs is huge and supports gaming now
Flakes. They offer truly reproducible, cross platform builds. I have a Neovim flake that runs my bespoke config gosh dang everywhere Nix does.
Home manager. My dotfiles and desktop configuration work across machines and sets up quickly every time I need it from scratch. With my current track record with SSDs this is hours of my life back.
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