NixOS is one of the few distros that legitimately offers something different. Some nice things:
- The entire OS install is managed through config files, so instead of dealing with a billion shitty DSLs, you only deal with one.
- Because of the above, builds are also reproducible.
- Because it ditches the FHS for the Nix store, you can do things like install multiple versions of the same library side-by-side, which is impossible with traditional Linux package management.
- It has the largest package repository of any Linux distro.
- Setting up dev environments is really nice because with Nix it's like the entire OS has VirtualEnv.
- Because of the above, "it works on my machine" is an excuse of the past.
It's very impressive and is a welcome innovation to the Linux ecosystem. Now if only they could improve the tooling and documentation.