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This seems more approachable than NixOS/Guix, which I see as state or the art for declarative hosts.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-... aims to flatten the learning curve for NixOS.

I love the concepts behind NixOS as well as Guix. I've tinkered with both, and Nix has served the daily driver role for multiple computers of mine.

One advantage this has over Nix is a simpler build toolchain. For some, that advantage may be quite useful. Even more so for the sh-based configuration management tool, rest[0], submitted several days ago.

While Guix is similar to Nix in it's higher amount of build dependencies, in theory, Guix's bootstrapping is at least elegant in comparison.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387081

I’ve been reading the pills (tutorials) and it’s actually been pretty nice. You just have to realize it’s more complicated than mapping JSON <> YAML.

https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/

Yes it is more advanced, but actually if you just think of the nix configuration language as an advanced JSON then that goes a long way in making it feel a lot less awkward IMO. Attrsets are basically JSON objects, and your final configuration is basically a huge, merged attrset.

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