yeah i was a little confused by the suggestion. If a client hands you a laptop to use for a project then there's corp. policy reasons why you have to use it as a contractor. (some companies have serious teeth in these policies)

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall and listen in when infosec calls you and asks why your laptop disappeared from their monitoring tools and you told them you installed nixos (assuming that would even be possible) because that's what you prefer.

Exactly. They don’t want you to just use their hardware. They want you to use all of it.