[pxc]

Fedora devs often also develop those components and are among the first to integrate them. Fedora seems like a great desktop for those curious about what's coming next to the Linux desktop stack.

NixOS doesn't curate a default desktop experience like Fedora does, but it's also a great place to enjoy some of this tech early, and in a very risk-free way thanks to declarative configuration and rollbacks. PipeWire has been effortless to set up (and impressively compatible, performance, and unobtrusive in its own right!) on NixOS for some time now.

A rolling release or a cutting edge kind of distro, even with regular releases, can be really nice if you're into exploring this stuff, like you say.

[georgyo]

I'm a big fan of NixOS, but sometimes it is obscenely difficult to test new things.

Example is iptables-nft. On every other distribution installing that is enough to make all applications use the nft version. In NixOS, you can easily change the environment path to iptables-nft, but any package that can modify rules won't be updated. And a package that updates rules is systemd. So attempting what is normally a 1 minute change is now recompiling every single package.

[pxc]

Yeah, it would be nice if Nixpkgs had something like Guix's grafts for replacing library dependencies like that without requiring mass rebuilds.

There, I suppose GuixSD is a stronger proposition than NixOS at the moment.