[DyslexicAtheist]

have been running debian sid on all my dev machines since ~7 years and not once had an issue. sure sometimes you need to diff a config file during a dist-upgrade but nothing every broke. ymmv. all my WM/DE sway/i3 gui stuff is self-compiled and so I get to see issues, dependencies and problems at compile time on my machine which I report upstream. It forces me in some rare cases dig until I understand and solve the problem. On the upside I know my tools really well down to every log entry that should or should not be there. Solving things becomes muscle memory (works better with a minimalist approach similar to the suckless philosophy). There is also a performance benefit of getting to use better CFLAGS such as `-mtune=native -march=native` or other hardening not available with packages. Once a day there is a cronjob polling git status for changes of relevant packages so I won't run out of date critically unpatched code. (oh and the great thing is by doing this often you also can follow the patches/diffs and quickly understand what is happening)

being lazy I've never considered the NixOS packing. it's a steep learning curve and also "old dog, new tricks". I'm sure it's awesome to use professionally but unless I see a commercial reason to use and apply it on the job, I won't bother (not because of lazy but because of many other competing things I want to do).