Agreed, but it does mean the evidence at her trial was not stall sufficient to prove guilt (beyond reasonable doubt).

You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:

For example, a Dockerfile will run something like apt-get-update as one of the first steps. Resources are accessible over the network at build time, and these resources can change between docker build commands. There is no notion of immutability when it comes to source.

and why nix builds are reproducible a lot of the time:

Builds can be fully reproducible. Resources are only available over the network if a checksum is provided to identify what the resource is. All of a package’s build time dependencies can be captured through a Nix expression, so the same steps and inputs (down to libc, gcc, etc.) can be repeated.

Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix’s reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.

AMD releasing a video talking about the laptop and saying that the Framework 16 AMD Advantage laptop will redefine the gaming laptop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Ww_7wwNkM&t=7s

never had that issue before, as long as they have the same version and config

Then you are very lucky. “It worked on my machine” is a meme for a reason.

wasn’t that possible before with snapshotting (btrfs/lvm)?

I haven’t used snapshotting with those before. I guess the difference is that with nix it is done by the package manager by default, with btrfs/lvm you would have to set that up independently (please correct of this is not the case).

So how useful it is in practice?

It’s useful for quite a few things in practise:

• You can be sure software that is packaged with nix will behave the same on different computers.
• You can avoid dependency conflicts.
• You can automate some things that would otherwise take multiple (mostly manual steps) on other systems.

This video shows off some of the cool things you can do with nix: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Le0IbPRzOE&feature=share9

How do updates work?

You update a programming by specifying the latest version of a program in config and rebuilding.

You update the OS by pointing to the channel you want to use and rebuilding.

You can time travel back to a previous state if anything goes wrong.

Can it play Crysis?

I expect so, some people.do use nix for gaming.