[bdimcheff]

Other developer here. I've been running nixos as my main OS since about November after running Funtoo for a year or so before that. My tolerance for hacking on my distro is maybe slightly above average. ;)

On the cool side: Nix is the first linux distro I've contributed to, because it's the standard "hack, fork, pull request" process that most github-hosted open source projects use these days.

The biggest thing is that you absolutely have to drink the nix koolaid if you're going to run nixos. You can't really do the normal ./configure && make && make install, because paths to libraries are all non-standard. But once it all really clicks, it's pretty great.

As far as desktop goes, the rest of this thread rings true for me too: most of the important things are there, like desktop environments, window managers, browsers, etc. There are occasionally niche/older packages that are not available. If you're willing to learn a little bit of nix language, it's relatively straightforward to add most packages.