Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reach out to me if you want to learn Nix I'm always happy to help people climb the steep learning curve
Curious, does one need to use nixOS for an optimal experience? I've been using debian for a long time and would prefer not to have to switch OSs but the idea of using nix for having full control over my package graph is very tempting. I've been somewhat procrastinating on trying nix as I've heard GNU Guix has a similar feature set and haven't been able to decide on which one to dive into... My ideal setup would be to…
My experience: no. I've been very happily using Nix on debian for years. Debian gives me my boring desktop apps (I have very very boring tastes), almost all my tinkering and development starts with drawing all the prerequisites from Nix.
The only times you get weirdness from using non-NixOS linux are things like running opengl apps, which simply require a wrapper script like `nixGL` to function properly.
And darwin Nix is just about the only thing that makes macos a bearable platform for me.