> There is an arrogance in the way of thinking that when you see everyone breaking your arbitrary rules you think to yourself "there is no way my rules are at fault, it's everyone else's fault for breaking them."

It's not really arrogance - it's just a different way to design a system. NixOS wants a few things:

1. An input-addressed dependency system

2. Easy and robust rollback/upgrades

3. Different versions of software/libraries/services coexisting on a single machine.

A lot of this is just impossible to have together with the way software were written, so NixOS made the changes necessary for them. When it became obvious it might be useful to other people, they upstreamed it.

I do agree with you that the whole `#!/usr/bin/env bash` shebang shenanigan is kinda ass (my personal nixos machine has a `/bin/bash` alias because there's not enough time in my life to care about this issue). But I also think that NixOS is right here, shebangs requiring a full path is just a terrible design in a multi-user world. If different users want to have a different bash implementation, they should be able to!

---

Fundamentally, I think the NixOS OS design is actually beautiful. It's taking most of what makes modern phone OS so reliable (read-only system, A/B partitions, etc...), and bringing their ideas in a shape that is coherent with desktop/server OS design.

I suggest you take a look at Fedora Silverblue. It accomplishes all 3 of those goals.