After 10 years of loyal Ubuntu usage on all my servers, I have gone with NixOS and I have to say that it's not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Home Manager and graphical apps can be a pain, but server side stuff is much, easier IMO and this is now my go-to server distro, where it's available. Postgres, NGINX, HaPROXY, even tougher stuff like Yggdrasil Network, all really easy to configure, though I haven't done any containerisation workloads (yet).
Nix would probably be my first choice if I was going to use an "enthusiast" distro. I tried it, I liked it(Unlike everything else non-debian/Ubuntu I've tried) but it seems unnecessarily powerful.
Ubuntu provides an opinionated workflow with self contained packages, with less work and more of an ecosystem, and more or less uses only concepts familiar to apt users already.
Nix still hasn't completed the Flakes transition, and it's not immediately clear at first glance what's declarative and what's not.
Snap is a lot simpler of a model. Include almost everything, except the base snap stuff, in a single package file, like an old school video game cartridge, rather than the UNIXy idea of software as part of the OS, carefully configured as part of a unique hand maintained system instance where all the parts have to work together perfectly.
Nix would probably be my first choice if I was going to use an "enthusiast" distro. I tried it, I liked it(Unlike everything else non-debian/Ubuntu I've tried) but it seems unnecessarily powerful.
Ubuntu provides an opinionated workflow with self contained packages, with less work and more of an ecosystem, and more or less uses only concepts familiar to apt users already.
Nix still hasn't completed the Flakes transition, and it's not immediately clear at first glance what's declarative and what's not.
Snap is a lot simpler of a model. Include almost everything, except the base snap stuff, in a single package file, like an old school video game cartridge, rather than the UNIXy idea of software as part of the OS, carefully configured as part of a unique hand maintained system instance where all the parts have to work together perfectly.
NixOS has better reproducibility, because config files as well as apps are part of their declarative one file to rule them all system, but Ubuntu is easier to make changes on.
It's the first disto that doesn't feel like it's still built for the era of instances that would be maintained by a dedicated sysadmin for decades.
