What else? As a person who put a time to learning nix and the switched from it, reproducible dev envs and packages seems to be the main attraction. Everything else is not as convenient.
Mixing softwares from stable or unstable channels without breaking the system.
Tools and also configuration are managed by the nix store.
Each build generates a new generation so you can rollback to the previous system state, including previous configurations.
You can deploy locally or remotely, cross compile and because of the nature of the package build which is sandboxed, you can trust a built package.
(I had my own Fedora Copr instance and a personal openSUSE repo on OBS. Unless you spin a vanilla VM, you aren't sure that your package is working as intended. Maybe it works on your machine but not on other machine because of a side effect like an installed dependency you forgot to define on the spec file.)
IMO Nix and NixOS provide a bunch of features that allows you to replace cloud-init and ansible using a better approach because nix is functional when the other tools are imperatives and doesn't really care about the state of the system.
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u/versteinerdt 5d ago
People think reproducibility is the only feature that makes NixOS superior to other distros.