Reflection on #NixOS vs #Ansible

Ansible gives that ever-so tempting option to make changes directly on the servers. Things you might justify as minor, unimportant, or urgent. Whatever the reason, you can easily sync the server state with Ansible later, right?

Later: One some unrelated task, all these changes show up in the dry run and are a distraction and drag to deal with.

#NixOS forces you to make the changes only to the "single source of truth", eliminating this class of issues.

@markstos think it adds on top a few more nice aspects. Especially if you freeze the versions of the inputs, you can rebuild the system again. Or build a variation for a VM to test tweaks.