From zero to nix
I heard about NixOS at the unfuck conference at my university the very first time. And I was impressed (although I was very tired at the moment the talk came up).
NixOS is, from my point of view, the next generation OS. The idea behind the package managing and handling of dependencies is just the way it should've been all the time. No longer “will this update crash my system or not?” fearing! So, finally, I installed NixOS on my secondary device this week. I had a Debian running Gnome3 on it beforehand, so I wanted to keep my /home directory.
I first burned a USB drive with a NixOS live image on it and started it. It shipped with KDE, which was not my taste (but way better than Gnome3 of course), but hey – on this kindof old machine, it just ran like hell! It was very fast compared to this Gnome crap!
I rebooted and chose the install option in the boot manager. I got a root shell.
I had a documentation. I followed the docs. It worked.
Now I have a NixOS machine that just works, running i3 as Window manager (copied configuration scripts from my main machine for convenience). I installed chromium (as I need this browser for video chatting). I had to override some build stuff for chromium, but luckily my build configuration was already available, so I didn't need to build it on my own (which would take years on this machine, still).
I would recommend NixOS to every linux guy out there, as it is the kind of approach that freaks your mind out while beeing so obviously the right way to do it (it = package management, configuration handling)