Am I out of touch?
No, it’s the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
What is a better implementation than NixOS? Guix is held back by the fact that it’s GNU only by default, and that it also compiles everything on your machine by default. You have to go out of your way to add a binary cache and speed up the install. That’s after you go out of your way to enable non-free packages so that your hardware can actually work with the right firmware. If someone made a version with those enabled by default things would be way quicker to setup and use
No, but it already supports multiple versions of software.
Though I would argue that many systems have dependency cache that should be replicable, specially when you build everything locally, you can pinpoint specific commits, not just versions that may be removed from repos.
But my comment was meant as a reference to building everything locally, as in I know what that’s like.
