Yeah, I've been using Unixey stuff for almost twenty years now (most of it Linux, and fell for the siren song of macOS for about four of them).

I liked Arch and Ubuntu and Mint and OpenSUSE well enough when I used them first, but once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything.

Being able to temporarily install things with nix-shell is game changing, and being able to trivially see what's actually installed on my computer by quickly looking at my configuration.nix is so nice. "Uninstalling" things boils down to "remove from configuration.nix and rebuild".

The automatic snapshots upon each build allows me to be a lot "braver" when playing with configurations than I was with Arch. I was always afraid to mess with video card or wifi drivers, because if I screwed something up and if I didn't know how to get back to where I was, I might be stuck reinstalling to get back to a happy state. This didn't happen that often but often enough to have made me a bit weary about futzing with boot parameters or kernel modules. Because of the automatic snapshots with NixOS, it's much easier (and more fun) to poke with the lower level stuff, because if I do break something in a way that I don't know how to fix, the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. For example, with my current laptop, there was a weird quirk with my USB devices having to "wake up" after not being used for more than thirty seconds, meaning that I might start typing and the first three or four words wouldn't go through. After some digging, I found out that the solution is to add "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" to the kernel params. I did that and it worked.

If I had still been running Arch or Ubuntu, I probably would have just learned to put up with it, because I would have been afraid to edit kernel parameters because of the risk of breaking things in a way that I don't know how to fix.

I love NixOS. I have no desire to leave, or at least I have no desire to abandon the model. I've considered changing to GNU Guix System since I like Lisp more than I like the Nix language, but those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.