> In the bubble I live on, classical VMs have become the exception nowadays, containers and serverless deployments are the rule now.

Nix does not require NixOS, and I would even wager that in corporate dev environments it's most often used in a standalone manner.

You can install Nix on Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat, get a reproducible local dev environment and build reproducible OCI images that can be deployed to K8S/Cloud Run/Fargate/etc [0], without ever touching NixOS.

[0]: https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-and-running-docker-...

Even if classical VM deployment, I still see a ton of containers. Like our database servers Ansible playbook which run Ubuntu are "Setup OS, mount disks, install docker apt repos, install stable docker, run container.

So Nix would let us avoid the Ansible playbook by just installing the Nix file but Ansible playbook is extremely rock solid so it feels like a problem we don't have. Also, we do pay for support for Cassandra to someone and while they officially would support us running on Nix, it's clear their support technicians are much more comfortable with RH or Debian based systems.

Arista, D.E. Shaw, Google are boring big corp

Several of those companies (replit) are building their business on nix.

With nix, even containers are optional.