[ris]

I honestly think that Nix is one of those things where "going all in" is one of the worst things you can do. Running a desktop system on NixOS is quite a tricky prospect for someone with no experience of Nix and you'll likely get frustrated with having to learn some potentially alien concepts to achieve simple things.

I tend to recommend people start in the shallow end, using Nix on a regular Linux distribution (or even macos) for a while. Use it to manage development environments and for ephemerally accessing tools as you need them.

For me, the place that NixOS itself really shines is on servers.

[mst]

Being able to spin up an entire network of qemu+kvm VMs easily to do proper integration testing of my system configs was a revelation.

[trexd]

I found that building my configuration on a virtual machine was the best way to go. This way I was not desperate to get things working and simply moved when I felt like all my essential programs were in place.