Two years ago I didn't know a thing about nix, NixOS or functional programming. I wanted to manage multiple machines with a sort of config file. Shouldn't be th

Two years ago I didn't know a thing about nix, NixOS or functional programming. I wanted to manage multiple machines with a sort of config file. Shouldn't be that hard, right? Removal of packages should be done automatically without explicitly removing the package. So brew and ansible failed already with those, to me at the time, pretty basic requirements. Building deb meta packages was inconvenient and they broke every single time when I didn't update a machine for some weeks. Managing requires, replaces, conflicts was cumbersome and often put me into hard problems. Then I learned about nix. First it seemed rather complex. Why does it need to do everything different? Strongly believing that it won't solve my problems and it isn't worth the rather steep learning curve. I tried two weeks to find alternatives but there where none and slowly nix seemed to be the only available solution to my problem which first didn't seem to be that complicated... Here I am now. With LOTs of struggle and sweat. Never gave up debugging the most strange errors and very often fixing them in the end. Starting as a total beginner and very slowly becoming a very big fan, advocate and contributor to NixOS. Not regretting the journey. Being happy to have remove all Debian frickel kisten from my life. :) PS: If you run NixOS 22.05 or older: Some parts of the code for your machine is from me. How awesome is that? Couldn't have imagined that two years ago.