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I would love to try FreeBSD but I'm too addicted to NixOS... If there was a way to have a NixOS-like declarative BSD system I'd give it a serious try.

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FreeBSD is kinda declarative. A lot of it is (or can be) configured in a text file called rc.conf

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rc.conf

It's not as completely declarative as Nix but it was never intended to be.

More like 3 files.

- /boot/loader.conf for kernel settings to be set only at boot

- /etc/sysctl.conf for kernel settings to be set anytime

- /etc/rc.conf for rest of configuration

What about declarative listing of installed packages? One of the neat things about NixOS is that I know exactly what packages I've manually installed since they're specified in my config file.

The other big difference I notice between NixOS and e.g. Debian is that on NixOS I only have to specify the changes from the defaults. On e.g. Debian I usually have to change config files that already exist. Then when the package updates its default config I end up having to review all the changes to the config, even when they have nothing to do with what I've explicitly configured.

You should really give it a try.

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?rc.conf

I don’t know how it compares to NixOS, but it is trivial to configure your own installer.

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