Yes, this is debating state management. For full declarativity some form of state management for the parts of the system that should be under declarative contro

Yes, this is debating state management. For full declarativity some form of state management for the parts of the system that should be under declarative control (like terraform) or a stateless but very holistic view of the system (like NixOS, I guess also Guix System) are needed. Given that ansible has neither it can't be much better then what it is. I disagree that that is the right choice though. As it is I see not much more value in ansible than in some sort of SSH over xargs contraption combined with a list of servers. The guarantees they give are the same. > Do you know every package that should be installed because it comes out of the box in the distro? Do you want to [...]? No, I don't want to. Thankfully, with NixOS I don't need to, since the pre-installed packages are automatically part of the declared state of my NixOS systems (i.e. I declare the wanted state in the same way in which the defaults are also declared, which makes it easy to merge both).