Speculating here, but similar tools like Ansible, Terraform an other IAC tools have only come up relatively recently.
Having this built-in is appealing to many people.
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Speculating here, but similar tools like Ansible, Terraform an other IAC tools have only come up relatively recently.
Having this built-in is appealing to many people.
Containerization / declarative configuration management / reproducible builds / immutable distros are hot right now because people have for a long time been sick and tired of their shit breaking when they upgrade, and are starting to realize that encapsulating changes in atomic transactions and keeping track of them better is a better way of doing things.
In other words, NixOS is riding the wave generated by the popularization of stuff like Docker, Ansible, CI/CD, etc.
Containers are now ubiquitous and people wanted their systems to be similarly easy? Silverblue/similar immutable OSes fizzled out and people started trying NixOS? Probably many factors, to be honest.
Personally, I needed a new OS for my gaming computer, and I decided to experiment with NixOS after having tried Silverblue in the past.
Don't forget that silverblue in the launch was a pain in the ass, because of applications not adopting portals and flatpak, so you needed to layer a lot of things, that wouldn't work because it uses /usr (that's read only) or scripts that do the same thing, since them a lot of things got modernized
Same reason Roblox is only now popular after 20 years: because it was complete shit for most of the time it has existed.
Correction: Roblox used to be good, and is now shit.
Roblox is just an engine, there are tons of shit games and many good ones. The Monetization however is quite shit
I installed it when it finally had an installer and I've been using it for a couple of years. I think that was the final thing to push it into mainstream (of Linux distros, widely known in narrow circles so to speak)
Growth have been fairly organic . number of contributors grew by 28 percent this year. there are a lot of users so given that a percent of them will do some form of advocacy that will probably lead to more users and there will be a relatively large amount of people saying they adopted it.
I'd like to say it's because I have such a big influence on the Linux Community, but I honestly don't know
coz of drama