Within a release there are no version bumps, only if you live on unstable or switch to a new release you would get them. The problem of an actual snapshot of yo

Within a release there are no version bumps, only if you live on unstable or switch to a new release you would get them. The problem of an actual snapshot of your entire system is that you don't really now what should be in there and it collects a lot of cruft/state. With NixOS you can write little modules for services and move those between VM/Machines, whatever floats your boat. IMHO this type of config management sucks less than ansible/chef etc because you are not fighting against the package manager. The configuration holds the ground truth on what is installed on the system.