NixOS is great and IMHO the lowest maintenance effort of any OS if you can stick to well-packaged software. It's also low effort if you need to package simple t

NixOS is great and IMHO the lowest maintenance effort of any OS if you can stick to well-packaged software. It's also low effort if you need to package simple things yourself. However, if you have to use something slightly unusual, it can become very convoluted quite quickly. Sparse documentation doesn't help, as you pointed out. One thing to keep in mind is that there are several escape hatches, such as FHSUserEnv or Distrobox. But if you need escape hatches too often, it kinda defeats the purpose of using NixOS altogether and something simpler is more adequate.