It's almost not even funny, but I tangle all my dotfiles from an org-mode file. The files it generates are all read-only - to discourage me from writing in them directly. This makes my OS config semi-immutable. Bootstrapping a system from scratch takes no longer than a few minutes and the biggest bottleneck is properly getting access to that dotfiles.org and installing Emacs. This has worked for years and that's why I never had to really learn Nix. I guess Emacs for me is the "true OS", and whatever on top is "just kernel stuff"