It's a fascist regime asserting power, I think neoliberalism and populism are not a good analytic framing. Elites still profit, the working class still suffers, but the mechanics are different. State violence must become more conspicuous. Racialized minorities are an easy target, and detentions and deportations are a welcome extrajudicial vehicle.
Same for me. I distro-hopped for about 20 years with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Fedora being the most memorable desktop setups for me. While all that was a valuable experience, NixOS feels like graduation.
For the Nix-curious: I wish someone would have told me not to bother with the classic config and build a flake-based system immediately. They're "experimental" in name only, very stable and super useful in practice.
Not sure if this is indended or not, but the somewhat controversial mother tree hypothesis stipulates exactly this -- trees borrowing carbohydrates (sugar) from neighbors via mycorrhizal networks.
A whole flock of them remembers the 80s though