[microtonal]

The nix language is fundamentally at odds with general purpose usability.

I have contributed or tried to contribute to many distributions (heck, I even worked for a commercial Linux distribution when I was young) and contributing to nixpkgs was an order of magnitude easier than other distributions. Part of it was the GitHub/PR-centered workflow, but the other part is that Nix is a small functional language and the package definitions are not in some arcane weird format like RPM spec files or Debian rules. Also, Nix makes it much easier to refine a derivation/package without actually having to install it on your system.

[pxc]

I want to second this experience. I've never actually submitted my contributions upstream for other distros, but I've maintained repositories for personal use for Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch, Gentoo, CentOS and Fedora.

Writing a new package from scratch based on Nixpkgs is far easier than for other distros, and easy packaging tasks are much easier with Nixpkgs than with other distributions.

(It's also much easier to distribute packages without standing up new infrastructure with Nix, since it's source-based and will fall back to source-based builds if you have no established mechanism for distributing binaries.)