Probably for the same reasons that healthy food is a luxury. Make it easier and far less tedious to get the shitty end of the stick. Most of the proles will just give up and accept it, especially in a world that seems to put instant gratification at the top of the TODO list over self-reliance and self-respect. In other words, fashion over function.

If they can surveil our conversations and control what we see and hear, then they can advertise shittier foods, which then puts us in the pockets of insurance and pharma once we develop conditions and diseases from said shitty food. Once you’re in that loophole, it’s already been said by the pharma execs themselves, “healing your customers is a bad business model.”

It’s for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It’s great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you’re not using a platform’s specific management tools.

I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it’s all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.

The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.

https://hydra.nixos.org/build/115931128/download/1/manual/manual.html#chap-overview

Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW

Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.

Also, if you run nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.

If you read the linked page:

So far, EU OS is a Proof-of-Concept for the deployment of a Fedora-based Linux operating system with a KDE Plasma desktop environment and bootable container technology in a typical public sector organisation.

I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I’m also a systems engineer and it’s the distro I use for managing all the environments.

I’m sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.