>On the server, however, NixOS is an incredibly good choice, and it's what I'm currently using to build my VPS on NixOS is also often a terrible choice for ser

>On the server, however, NixOS is an incredibly good choice, and it's what I'm currently using to build my VPS on NixOS is also often a terrible choice for servers. I once had the misfortune to be part of a multi-user server running on NixOS. The idea made sense: users could all have their own versions of software installed. In practice, it was a disaster: NixOS seems to fundamentally assume that all users have root access. Many ordinary processes ended up involving administrator involvement. Want to change your shell? Contact the administrator. Password? Contact the administrator. Add or remove an SSH key? Contact the administrator; hopefully you don’t do anything like use per-device keys. Run a user service? Contact the administrator, who might also need to do all the configuration for you. Numerous options that would be user-configurable in other distributions ended up in configuration.nix. And looking or asking for help online was an exercise in frustration: the idea that I wasn’t able to use sudo or edit configuration.nix seemed completely foreign. Fortunately, we were able to switch everything over to Debian. This had the advantage of both actually working for normal user accounts, and still letting people use Nix, arguably with fewer problems. I do expect someone may reply with some poorly (or un-) documented approach to handling these problems, perhaps using unstable and experimental features, but that tendency in itself was a considerable frustration in using Nix.