Passwords and secrets like cryptographic key files are everywhere in computing. When configuring a Linux system, sooner or later you will need to put a password somewhere — for example, when I migrated my existing Linux Network Storage (NAS) setup to NixOS, I needed to specify the desired Samba passwords in my NixOS config (or manage them manually, outside of NixOS). For personal computers, this is fine, but if the goal is to share system configurations (for example in a Git repository), we need a different solution: Secret Management.