Why I Picked NixOS for a 24/7 Home AI Server, and the 5 Gotchas That Bit Me During Install

Building a 24/7 unattended AI server as a local-LLM playground, I dropped my original plan of Arch and went with NixOS. Here is why I chose declarative config and rollback, and — on a Blackwell GPU (RTX 5090), basically zero-precedent pioneer territory — the five things that actually tripped me up installing from the minimal ISO: the wpa_supplicant trap, btrfs mount options getting dropped, losing the network on a headless reboot, WiFi power save wrecking SSH latency, and remote sudo + glob expansion.