I've been maintaining homelab servers for two decades, used all kinds of IaC approaches etc.

Switched to NixOS a few years ago, and I can't overstate the amount of peace it has brought to my life. It just takes so much stress away, compared to everything else I've used before.

My only criticism is that the Nix language is not super ergonomic or easy to learn. But with LLMs nowadays, even that is barely ever a problem.