That aspect of nixos is great. I ran it for a while and found that it's excellent once you have things working, but debugging and getting to that place was far more painful than with other distros. In a few years I'll try switching to it again
I wanted to love their socks, but the way they fit my feet is just awful. Tight in the wrong places and loose in others. Curious if others have the same experience
Fair enough. Every service I run depends on encrypted data, so starting the machine without decrypting isn't worthwhile in my case. I have to decrypt to get everything back up after power loss anyway.
Main advantages I'm aware of for full disc encryption are encrypted swap and system config. Overkill for some use cases so YMMV, but wanting to point out that decrypting at boot can be done.
I may be missing something in your use case. As long as you have the port forwarded you can decrypt from anywhere. Use pub key auth and you're good to go
If this topic interests you and you are into gaming, I highly recommend SOMA