if you use nixos you end up feeling like you need to spend more time developing your personal computer's configuration than developing your actual projects, ime.

it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.

This might have been the case a couple of years ago, but it is certainly not true any more, if you use AI [even occasionally] to manage some of your default.nix and flake.nix files. I learn by getting AI to edit it (default.nix for example), and then study what it did. It helps.

The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.

NixOS people are kinda like Jehovah's Witnesses of Hacker News. Every time someone mentions Linux problems there is that one guy asking "But have you tried Nix?". No offense I just find it funny.

1. *nix problems, including bsd including darwin.

2. nix is just package manager and configurator of sh which forces to write idempotent sh code with explicit dependencies(just good practices right? check guidelines of any non nix solutions and you will find out that 90% of these rules are just nix). nixos, nix darwin, nix home manager final artifacts are just just idiomatic dotfiles, so nix does not exist.