Eh, new defaults configurations do NOT merit a new distro. I've long believed this, and since I discovered NixOS it is now clear that there is away to avoid it.
How do you use NixOS to manage your OS and applications and configurations? I thought it was for having reliable reproducable builds?
Nix the package manager is for getting deep control and hard guarantees about your dependencies. NixOS uses Nix, but also gives you ways to 1) specify your system's configuration declaratively from the beginning* and 2) reliably get that configuration running on another machine without having to worry about, say, conflicts with existing dependencies.
Or at least that's the theory. In practice I'm mostly still trying to get my mouse to work. :-P
*As opposed to layering a declarative system over an imperative one, which I think is more or less what Chef, Docker, Ansible, et cetera are doing.