It is fascinating and rather unexpected for me to realize I haven't found a need to reinstall my primary #NixOS machine since I wrote this blog post in 2020. Even when I migrated to a bigger ssd, I just copied the whole disk (via #btrfs snapshot send) and continued as before (with some grub & uuid fiddling).
Intuitively it would feel that an OS that has a major release twice a year and only a month (!) of support for the previous release would have more chance to have screwed up an install at some point. But in practice it's the opposite. And I have a somewhat less common disk setup with encrypted grub and such.
This is not to say NixOS is perfect, and it's certainly not for everyone. It's an exotic distro with its own functional programming language that manages everything.
It has its own pain points and surprises (probably deserving a new blog post at some point).
But one of the quite unexpected experiences for me is the total absense of any need or desire to wipe and start afresh.
