alt Hacker NewsFyi: NixOS would shine everytime a client handed you a laptop for the gig. Your working environment reproducible and declarative. Setup in minutes, not hours.
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NixOS rocks, but if there is some software you need to install to comply with company policies (e.g. Vanta) then you may be in for some unexpected tinkering.
I would suggest Home Manager though, which will let you set up your environment just as well and is very portable, while still affording you a mainstream host system of the company's choice.
Absolutely not, the company laptop will be locked down and you won't be able to install your own OS.
Knowing how to work with builtin tools would shine in that environment. I first learned this style in a Spolsky blogpost were they talked about Wasabi, a language that compiled to either PHP or Visual Basic I think it was, the idea being that those languages were preinstalled in most servers of the era.
In a similar sense, knowing how to work with the builtin tools of major OS is a huge advantage. If you can write your code in vim or nano or notepad without breaking a sweat over your favourite hotkeys not working, that's a lot of hours saved.
You don’t even need full on NixOS. I do the same with nix-Darwin and home manager. It’s not the perfect reproducible purists machine due to homebrew and Mac designs but it doesn’t really need to be, just mostly so
2015 me didn't know that. But chances are, I wouldn't have been able to install it with their company software policy tools.
Ansible and vagrant is easier and battle tested.
Having to figure out how to make whatever random god-awful corporate software they got sold work on nixos -- on a deadline -- sounds like seven circles of hell.