"I hope you only use it as motivation to do something more than pollute the Linux distribution space."
If there weren't all these extraneous niche Linux distributions, maybe promising ones like http://nixos.org/ would actually get the attention they deserve.
Now there is an interesting project! That's going to be the next OS on my netbook.
I love that the package manager makes it trivial to have multiple versions of the same program. There are always some programs I like to have a stable distribution-maintained package of as well as the latest development version.
And this:
$ nixos-rebuild test
This builds and activates the new configuration, but doesn’t make it the boot default. Thus, rebooting the system will take you back to the previous, known-good configuration.
An even nicer way to test changes is the following:
$ nixos-rebuild build-vm
$ ./result/bin/run-*-vm
This builds and starts a virtual machine that contains the new system configuration (i.e. a clone of the configuration of the host machine, with any changes that you made to configuration.nix).
If there weren't all these extraneous niche Linux distributions, maybe promising ones like http://nixos.org/ would actually get the attention they deserve.