For what it's worth, I personally do use Arch for my homelab and still achieve cattle not pets because the Arch install media comes with cloud-init so I simply

For what it's worth, I personally do use Arch for my homelab and still achieve cattle not pets because the Arch install media comes with cloud-init so I simply keep a cloud-config with the modules to build a server from scratch on a separate USB stick with a drive that has "cidata" on a label and plug that into a machine along with the install media before hitting the power button. I don't know if Nix would have been easier but cloud-init just lets you run scripts that you presumably already know how to write if you're the kind of person who does this sort of thing. No need for a DSL. Someone is going to chime in with "boo yaml" and sure, but a person interested in running a homelab is almost certainly a person who manages a bunch of servers for work too and there's no escaping cloud-init, Ansible, Kubernetes, or something using yaml that you're not going to have a choice about. Assuming the point of a homelab is at least partly to practice what you do on the job without the possibility of destroying something owned by someone else (which is what this guy says his reason was), you may as well get used to the tools you're going to have to use anyway and not make your home setup too much different than the environment you manage at work. Of course, I know a lot of people on Hacker News are not like me and this guy and use "homelab" to mean they want to self-host media servers, chat, and photo sharing and what not for their family and friends, not have a mini data-center as a practice ground for the real data center they manage in their day job.