Your timescale is skewed. You're either young, pushing a narrative, or both, so let me describe how things look historically from a sample size that actually matters. 2 presidents is not a big sample size.

Starting in the 80s, the American economy began to decline and the national debt began to rise under Reagan and politicians like him - trickle down economics had begun. In the late 90s, a president balanced the budget and actually began reducing the national debt (by cutting funding to social security and other less than stellar actions). That would be Clinton. And then along came Bush Jr and the post 9/11 forever war in the Middle East. Ever since the start of the Iraq war, the national debt has risen like an ICBM. I remember when news channels talked with disbelief about Bush possibly doubling the national debt within a year.

So it's 2008, Bush just finished up his second term, and hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything in the 2008 depression (except for Bush's rich friends. They got government bailouts and made bank buying up all the poor people's houses). So, what now? Now, a black man who runs on a campaign of changing things for the better wins the election in a landslide, and tries to do most of what he promised. The economy sees large amounts of growth and jobs added, and the spiraling of the national debt slows down. However, Republicans vow to never let a black man do anything in the White House and the Democrats capitulate before the fight ever starts, so Obama is hamstrung and despite trying, ends up being forced by Republicans shutting down the government to not fulfill any of his campaign promises in his two terms (except for installing a healthcare system that Republicans fought tooth and nail against because it makes it illegal for health insurance companies to kick cancer patients off their health insurance and then refuse to cover them for having a preexisting condition: cancer).

Now it's 2016 and a man who ran on a campaign of undoing everything the black man before him did and the promise of kicking out all the politicians that he's been friends with since his big business days in the 80s has been elected. And what does he do? He spends the first 2 years largely going line by line and undoing every single thing that the black man did while in office, and then spends the next 2 years mostly giving tax breaks and government money to the friends he said he would kick out and "drain the swamp" while the national debt once again rises like a tide in a swamp and the economy stagnates. Then 2019 hits and the economy collapses again under a worldwide pandemic, just a month after he got rid of the office the black man set up to prevent a pandemic.

So now it's 2020 and the country has just elected the old guy who was the black guy's right hand man. He campaigned on not rocking the boat and keeping the course. Nothing exciting, but we'll see what happens. True to form, 4 years of stabilization happen. The debt slows down, the economy sees jobs come back, and things are looking a little more calm.

Then, in 2025 the old guy who was so upset about the black guy comes back and his swampy friends are right behind him. The debt begins to balloon and the economy starts to shudder under the weight of global tariffs and worldwide uncertainty of a possible trade war against friend and foe alike. And that's just in the first 3 months of the year.

Tl;dr: the economy consistently grows under democrat presidents and the national debt slows down. Under Republicans, the economy shrinks and the debt skyrockets. This stays fairly consistent the farther back you go, but Reagan is an important point in this because he started trickle down economics and showed the Republicans that big government can be good for them, too, so long as they hold the purse strings, and Bush is the other important point because he's the tipping point for when the debt went from manageable to using a sink to try to put out a burning building.

I never said otherwise. I said that the economy does better under Dems than Republicans. That doesn't mean that it's the way things should be done, just that under Dems jobs are added to the economy rather than lost and the national debt grows at a slower rate than under Republicans. Between the two, the economy objectively does better under Dems.

I simply was saying that the "Biden bad because brown people and the economy broke because woke" narrative is a farce no matter how you look at it.

On atomic distros, you install stuff mostly via flatpak and distrobox. I'd even recommend using distrobox on traditional systems because you can just kill the box if you don't want it any longer. You can have multiple package managers at the same time installed without problems, e.g. yay, dnf and zypper. I guess you could even take your box with you when switching to a new distro (e.g. when switching from atomic fedora to opensuse as I did recently) but I have not yet done that.

Yes, management could be more end user friendly, but it'll get there

Curious what kind of real world use makes it a good choice?

It's declarative. Everything is (usually) configured via Nix itself, without requiring manual steps of running additional commands. This ends up being pretty useful when you have a fleet of devices that you want to configure.

Changing config is atomic. If you end up breaking your system when trying to tweak it, you can boot into the previous generation and try again with different settings.

Ah yes, arch but fascist.

pass