I used to run this in a VM on my MacBook Air and use it as my development environment: Xmonad, emacs, stow for config that Nix can't handle, etc. etc. The experience on some level suffered because of it being inside a VM, but the value of having the entire system configured and inside version control was incredible.
My only complaint was that it was difficult to install system packages built in Ruby, NodeJS, etc. without having to submit them to the main repository. It's for a good reason, of course, but back then it was frustrating when some CLI tools could only be installed through rubygems or NPM. Those scripts weren't always so easy to write because the process was largely undocumented, and it just felt weird that it was essentially leading to a separate package repository that was responsible for reproducing many others.
That was a few years back so I'm curious to see how that may have changed, as I would seriously consider working with NixOS for small server deploys in favour of building a K8S cluster or buying into PaaS.
My only complaint was that it was difficult to install system packages built in Ruby, NodeJS, etc. without having to submit them to the main repository. It's for a good reason, of course, but back then it was frustrating when some CLI tools could only be installed through rubygems or NPM. Those scripts weren't always so easy to write because the process was largely undocumented, and it just felt weird that it was essentially leading to a separate package repository that was responsible for reproducing many others.
That was a few years back so I'm curious to see how that may have changed, as I would seriously consider working with NixOS for small server deploys in favour of building a K8S cluster or buying into PaaS.