[tombert]

A lot of people say this, but honestly this kind of sounds like someone who doesn't understand the ethos around NixOS. NixOS isn't just a vanilla Linux distro with Nix preinstalled

The whole point of NixOS is that the entire system is managed by Nix. The entirety of everything is declarative in your configuration file(s) and the entire system can consistently be rebuilt from the configuration. The root system is immutable after being built and as such it is trivial to snapshot.

This isn't just a trivial implementation detail, it changes the entire way that you use the computer. Boot parameters, drivers, installed programs, everything is done via configuration, as opposed to installing Nix on Ubuntu where most stuff is still managed haphazardly and mutably.

You might not think that's good or worth it, but I dispute the notion that installing Nix on a non-NixOS distro gives you the "best of both worlds". They're very different things.

[rgoulter]

OP had a situation where software he wanted to run didn't work with NixOS.

If OP wanted the benefits of the Nix package manager (e.g. per-project development environments, using Nix to build container images, etc.), and didn't want the friction of "how do I run this software on NixOS", I think it's straightforward that using Nix on a non-NixOS distro is a practical choice.

[rowanG077]

Using nix on non-NixOS definitely has benefits, I don't think that's disputed. But it's not "the best of both worlds" as the things NixOS gives are immense and not at all fully provided by just using nix on another OS.