This is great! The one fly in the ointment, pardon, is that Nix is a bit lax about trusting proprietary and binary-only stuff. It would be great if there were a FLOSS-only core system for NixOS which would be fully transparent.
It's the pragmatic thing. I wouldn't use nixOS if I wasn't able to use it on a 16 core modern desktop. I don't think there's a performant and 100% FLOSS compatible computer that wouldn't make me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon when building stuff for ARM.
Talos has 44 core/176 thread server options which can take 2 TBs of DDR4 that are FSF certified. The board firmware is also open and has reproducible builds.
Talos have as low as 8 core desktop options as well this is just an example of how far you can take FLOSS hardware. Not that I consider a 16 core x86 desktop "consumer-grade" in the first place (speaking as a 5950X owner).
Probably not fit for replacing Grandma's budget PC but then again grandma probably isn't worried about the ARM cross compile performance of their machine running NixOS either.
Thanks, I was legitimately unaware of this option. That does smash my argument, but I'm not likely to be using a system like that anytime soon due to cost concerns mostly.
And it’s not just hardware, there is a useful limit on purity of licenses. In many cases only proprietary programs can do the work at all, or orders of magnitudes better.
