Sorry to be that person but: As someone who's been using NixOS as their daily driver for about three years (after switching to it from Debian) and is currently trying out a MacBook I can tell you that NixOS provides a very different experience than everything else you've mentioned (including macOS). The only other OS I'm aware of that it's comparable to is Guix System which is distantly related to NixOS.
NixOS in its unofficial "endgame" is more like a container where you can strictly define what files to keep between reboots and everything else gets thrown away. Except unlike a container it covers your entire filesystem (not just a single application) and it's actually usable for things like a laptop since you don't have to reboot between making changes. There's a popular blog post titled "Erase your darlings" that explains it in more detail[1]. And, like with a container image (but different in how it's done), NixOS forces you to write any and all changes to your system's programs or config as code that can be introspected and delivers repeatable results.
This is definitely not to everyone's taste but for me this is now the only way to keep computers "clean" in the long term (sans specialized distros like Talos Linux). I can just look at the source code to know exactly what I'm running and I can delete stuff I no longer want without having to think about leftover files or anything like that. Backups also get a lot simpler when you only have to think about the persistent volume of your system and your config and full restores are just a matter of reinstalling with your config in place.
macOS is gorgeous and I love how everything just works pretty much (except defining global keyboard shortcuts). But I've been so spoiled by NixOS catering to my config management obsession that everything else feels kind of primitive in that regard. My dream would be the macOS userland and kernel on top of Apple hardware but built and assembled with the Nix module system. And then some APFS magic to make an ephemeral root filesystem work.
(Also yes I've tried nix-darwin. Love it and I'm infinitely grateful it exists because I'm also using a MacBook at work but it's not the same kind of "complete" experience that NixOS provides.)
I've been using NixOS for a couple of years; I still have it on one of my RasPis. I've had a moderately elaborate config for my laptop. I could enumerate all of the problems I've had with it, but back to my point: not that different from every other distribution. Once you get past the insane level of ecosystem fragmentation and DIY fixes (which NixOS adds to- with "regular" configs vs flakes), there's still the UX department, where both KDE and Gnome are severely lacking.
Of course, the software that goes onto a NixOS installation is the same as on most other Linux distros so it's not any different in that regard. What I was trying to say is the config management aspect - especially when used with an ephemeral root FS - provides an entirely different way of managing your computer that's not really possible to replicate anywhere else (except Guix as I've mentioned).
Not that that makes it objectively better or worse. The config shtick of NixOS can also be really annoying to someone who just wants to install stuff and move on. It comes down to personal preference.
Personally I prefer the approach that the BSDs took: your OS has a "base" that is designed and integrated as a whole, provides basic services (SSH, httpd, mail, etc) plus a spartan GUI and all the tools to support its own development. Everything else is in ports/packages, which theoretically can be erased all at once with no loss in core functionality. It's conceptually simple and works OK in practice.
Notably, macOS (a BSD in my book) took the next logical step and completely sealed the base OS, all the way via logical volume management, verified boot chain, SEP (aka TPM), etc.
I agree that NixOS solves configuration management in a much more elegant way, but that elegance carries a heavy cost: it requires domain knowledge to comprehend. Personally I just keep /etc in git, and use judo to propagate changes. <https://github.com/rollcat/judo>
If you're looking for something different in AAA shooters, try Splatoon. It's basically the antithesis to classic shooter tropes and it has a whole world of art designed around it (with fictional bands, promotional art for in-game events, etc.)
To clarify maybe, NixOS puts all configuration and program files it handles in a world-readable object store on disk. If you want to manage secrets on NixOS securely, you have two choices:
- Manage it out of band. That negates all of the benefits of NixOS, at least for those files. (I.e. you would need additional deployment steps, rollback wouldn't work, you would have to stop and migrate system services that depend on those secrets yourself, etc.)
- Encrypt it and only decrypt it on activation (which happens when switching to a new config or on boot). agenix and nix-sops (the premier SOPS/NixOS integration) are two libraries that you can include in your config to do that. With this, the world-readable store only contains encrypted secrets.
Of course with #2 you still have to manage your private keys (age or whatever SOPS uses) out-of-band but that is significantly less work since those aren't expected to change nearly as much. You can also generally decouple that from your day-to-day deployment workflow.
Apart from that while it's true that the compositor has to do everything, some of the interfaces seem to be shared (standardized? I don't know enough about Wayland development tbh) across different compositors: https://wayland.app/protocols/
What I like about Go is not the language itself (I'm not a language designer but I dislike a lot of choices that Go makes) but the entire culture around it of doing things the idiomatic way and moving on. I'm someone who, if you give them a tool that's flexible, will spend time optimizing it. And I'm already busy optimizing other stuff so it's nice to have something constant to build upon.
Oh and you don't have to use large power-hungry IDEs that don't integrate with any sort of config management to get a decent experience! (/hj)
If I ever learn Haskell it's over for y'all though.
(Agree with OP btw, using codegen to get the enums I want is a workable remedy for Go's lack of enums.)
$50 that xeiaso.net will overtake justine.lol this year. (Kidding of course, they're two of my favorite sites.)