Yeah, NixOS is definitely a journey. For me personally, a very fun one. You’re kinda experiencing what is was like experiencing linux for the first time. Took me like half a year to get proficient with nix in a way I was productive with it.

That configuring some programs is completely different from how it should be is a weird quirk of home-manager. I personally don’t use it, it adds a lot of complexity for not much benefit.

But for me, nix saved me in terms of linux. I‘m someone who frequently switches around devices or just completely wipes their existing ones (I‘m very messy with file management, and I just need a clean install after a year or two). It was incredibly annoying to use other distros, especially if you are tinkering a lot it can occasionally happen that you brick your install. You kinda had to document all the fixes for certain issues so that you didn‘t forget them. I could think of more things. That’s just specific to me, but Nix solves all those problems. Not sure I‘d be using linux if it wasn’t for NixOS.