demesisx OP , 6 hours ago

to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

If you have only one system, you might find the benefits not to be worth the bikeshedding effort.

However, I suspect that you’d be surprised with how easy it can be using home-manager. I have literally nothing that I need to do to a newly compiled NixOS system from my config because EVERYTHING is declared and provided inside of that config.

If you don’t mind, can you give me an example of something in your config that you think is impossible or difficult to port to the Nix style? I’d be happy to attempt to Nixify it to prove my point. I’ve pretty much figured out how to do everything in the Nix way.

and I don’t mind if I end up being incredibly wrong on this point and promise to be intellectually honest about it if I am indeed wrong. It just sounds like a fun exercise for me.