My Linux desktop experience has been 2 years of Ubuntu/Debian, 4 years of Fedora and 2 years of NixOS. Hands down, and NixOS is my favorite. It's easy to recover from issues since I've gotten the hang of the build error messages and/or I can just reset my config to the last commit. It took me one year before jumping into flakes and glad I did. Next year, I'm going into Home Manager.

A custom GPT have been surprisingly helpful after feeding it manuals for nix, nixpkgs and NixOS and other Linux books.