I spent 2 years using NixOS as my sole development OS and I learned a ton. But every little thing is a battle. Prior to that I used Arch Linux for like 8 years

I spent 2 years using NixOS as my sole development OS and I learned a ton. But every little thing is a battle. Prior to that I used Arch Linux for like 8 years and it was so much more pleasant to use for day to day dev (due to the great package manager and high quality packages and, well, mutability). At some point last year I came to the conclusion that the immutability/repeatability of NixOS just isn't worth the drawbacks for a development machine. I swapped to openSUSE Tumbleweed and haven't looked back. It never gets in the way - I install what I want, manage my dotfiles in chezmoi, and rarely need to fight the OS to do what I need it to do. I think NixOS has some interesting applications at scale. If I had to manage a fleet of 100+ machines and ensure they are all identical, and I can easily roll back changes, NixOS would be a prime candidate. Similarly, I still think Nix the package manager is pretty great for individual project dependency management. There isn't really anything like it as far as I know.