NixBSD: Project Mixes FreeBSD and NixOS in One

I think it's a great combination, but with jails, ports and boot environments, FreeBSD has everything to achieve similar features than nix. What FreeBSD really needs is more packages and nix may help, but the big work is porting the packages, not the package manager I'm afraid.

That say I'm all for it, I think nix is great and is a very viable alternative/complement to containers and config management.

I see it becoming bigger really. I use FreeBSD as daily driver for years now and judging by the community groups it's growing. Of course when you're such a small community (I recently saw FreeBSD has 0.01% of the desktop market :) ) it's not very hard to have big relative growth. But I don't mind being part of a small community. The maintainers are great.

I wouldn't want to use NixBSD though for that purpose, I don't like declarative management on my desktop. FreeBSD already has the best part of it with its central rc.conf file. But I want to keep manual control of installed software.

This could be nice though for containers (or jails as they're called on bsd)

As a Linux user, it's hard to see the appeal of BSD, or to appreciate it enough to make the jump. At least for me, still haven't found a good reason yet.