My favorite example of how idempotent NixOS is has to do with the DE. If you've ever looked at switching from gnome to KDE, or the other way around, most distros suggest to just re-install because each DE leaves so much cruft around and it's so hard to remove everything in a safe manner.

With NixOS, you just change one line in your config, and the DE is cleanly swapped.

I would separate NixOS from other immutable distros. NixOS is really about giving you blank slate and letting you fully configure it.

You do that configuration using a static config language that is able to be far more idempotent than Andible. It’s also able to define packages that are well contained and don’t require dynamic linking setup by manually installing other packages.

Immutable distros, on the other hand, really have no advantage to your setup and will probably feel more restrictive. The main use I see for them is for someone new or lazy that wants to get a working system up and running quickly.

I’ve worked on dev tooling in a fairly large company. Especially for cyber security, do not get a Mac. A lot of the tools are just different enough on a Mac that they will make your life much harder.

I would say it’s actually easier in many cases. Nix has really fantastic packaging tooling. You do have to learn a bit of the nix language, however (not become an expert).

The issue comes when trying to build from source. In most other distros, ou just follow the readme. In nix, you have to package it.

I wasn't trying to go into typing as much as using structs or objects when working with known data attributes. Sorry that it was a bit misleading.

The original actually went into using trees, sets, heaps, tries, etc., but it felt way too... ranty. After writing all that out, I realized that most of those other cases come up really infrequently, and that my biggest gripe was about not using structs or other pre-defined key container types. I thought it would be better to keep things short and focused.

Maybe I should re-write and publish a data structures edition.

I love the addition of dataclass. Makes refactoring such a breeze. If you need to extract some function, boom, you already have a class that you’re using everywhere.

My first guess would be emulation for apps that do not run on aarm by default.

A lot of OSS devs don’t want to spend time supporting a closed architecture. Especially some of the more privacy and openness focused apps that you’re running.

I’ve used pine64 boards for this. They have a few more options and are always available.

Yeah that's totally fair. It's definitely far from perfect. Although, I do like that it provides at least some level of isolation.

That's a super interesting idea. I will have to give that a shot!

Right now I just use flatpak for all my gaming needs and shared things like browsers, slack, etc.

What keyboard is that?

I feel like this is a trend with dynamic languages that have a REPL. I’ve done a lot of Common Lisp in the past, and had the same feeling.

The best way to get over this is to pop open the python REPL and start playing around with the options and functions. It takes very little ceremony to get a nice example rolling.

https://realpython.com/python-repl/ has some nice advice and tips on extra things you can do in the REPL.