Several points to this. 1. It's "immutable" not "inmutable". 2. There are lots of immutable distros without Nix. Fedora CoreOS and Atomic. Ubuntu Core. Endles

Several points to this. 1. It's "immutable" not "inmutable". 2. There are lots of immutable distros without Nix. Fedora CoreOS and Atomic. Ubuntu Core. EndlessOS. SUSE MicroOS. Immutability is irrelevant here. 3. You miss the point that the commenters were making: it's necessary to be able to fix computers when software goes wrong. This is the entire basis of a global trillions-of-dollars industry and most of my career for a third of a century. This is not a "nice to have", it is a 100% cast-iron REQUIREMENT. 4. If being declarative is so important, then explain WHY because most of OS design isn't, and yet somehow they have been working for 60 or 70 years now. It's like functional languages: none of the fans can be bothered to take the time to explain why they are so good, and as a result, nobody cares. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-... 5. You may not care about isolation, but I am telling you: the rest of the IT world cares a LOT. I predicted the rise of containers in 2013, before Docker was founded: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/18/brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_3 https://www.theregister.com/Print/2011/07/18/brief_history_o... (I think it was this one.) Isolation is huge and vitally important and in the field of Linux it's worth billions. If Nix offers radically new and better methods then it needs radically new and better explanations because there are lots of existing methods and they work fine. You seem to be addressing side issues and niggles to me, and avoiding confronting the core thing. Being able to read, understand, navigate and maintain the filesystem hierarchy is a keystone of Unix. If you want to remove that keystone then you must have extraordinarily good reasons, and after reading tens of thousands of words of discussions of Nix, I am not convinced the reasons are good enough. I think a human-readable filesystem could be retained, and improved over existing designs, while also delivering declarative generation and management. I am trying to point this out, proposing examples and mechanisms, and you (and the wider Nix community) are not addressing it. Instead, the world is saying "we really want this and we will not give it up" and the Nix folk are not listening.