but I am using it not in the way it's intended

This is absolutely intended. Nix is a programming language, package manager, and operating system.

Nix the package manager is intended to be used on nixos and non-nixos operating systems. It has first party support for Darwin (macOS).

My nixos build is not daily driver ready, so I'm still on Ubuntu for my productivity systems. The majority of the Ubuntu apps I use are managed via nix using home manager at this point. These share the same configurations with my nixos systems.

It is relatively low risk* since nix installs everything in /nix/store and sets up some env vars and user systemd services with symlinks to map to there. If I install Firefox with nix, the Ubuntu version is still there untouched. My PATH just hits nix first before the system. You have to change like one file if I'm remembering correctly after uninstalling if you want to back out which is the trigger for a nix package to come before a native package.

• If you dip into declarative app configs (zsh, fish, nvim, etc.) you can absolutely lose the original. I tracked all that in a dotfiles repo before nix personally. Just have backups and start small.

lol true, i read a comment that explained it as " nix is for people who need to install different apps all the time, especially programmers who need to test with every different lybrary etc, or people who need to have their system writen in a config file, to deploy it to others computers etc" so for me this isn't viable, i only use nix for a few packages that i want to keep up to day, or packages that fedora don't have, that's way i went with fedora atomic and nix, a stable system but without needing the entire nixOS