For many security-conscious administrators, the Nix daemon presents a problem: a highly-privileged daemon that parses complex file formats, executes code, and performs error-prone file management; all at the request of untrustworthy users.

A simple question — "What if one could build as an unprivileged user?" — turned into a rabbit hole of syscalls, systemd, and shadow due to Linux's paradoxical problem: in order to lose permissions, one must first gain more.