Thank you for the write-up!!

Notes while I’m watching:

1. The “vibe” is different - in my head I translated this to “he likes the GUI more”
2. Minetest has zero “story” / progression (so no Ender Dragon to gear up for & fight) - it’s purely a sandbox experience.
3. better performance, apparently runs on potato laptops pretty well
4. Mods are built-in, and don’t require tools like Forge or whatever to tweak a jar file ⬅️ THIS is cool!
5. Customization via the Settings menu

The “built-in support for mods” caught my eye. That’s pretty slick, and a headache with MC.

tl;dr - it runs on just about everything, and focuses on giving the player an easy-to-mod “sandbox” to play in.

I don’t get NixOS

It’s not for everyone. The idea is to have your entire system reproducible with a few configuration files, which you’d then ideally store in a VCS like git.

I haven’t messed with it, but there is something appealing about the ability to reboot to an older snapshot of the system if an update breaks something, or being able to use a config file to restore your system to the exact OS version and exact versions of whatever apps you use.