That's interesting, and not something I'd noticed (I have a 2GB NixOS VM for tinkering with it). That makes NixOS far less attractive for the things I was think it would be a natural for: containers. Because containers need to be reproducible, and because the current crop of container management and deployment tools are really messy, NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually).

But, if it's not possible to custom build tiny containers on demand without needing a ton of memory, the power of it becomes less fun. I'm visualizing a system whereby you spin up custom environments based on need (with exactly and only the packages and config you need for the specific task, at hand), on demand, in a distributed environment. That'd be harder if the resources to spin up are very high.

apt and yum both can consume a lot of memory when installing large lists of packages, but 1GB is pretty far out, and you can work around it by installing a small number of packages at a time. Which slows it down, but allows installation to work on even very small systems (like 128MB, or even smaller, if you've got a little swap).