Linux

You’ve basically identified the advantages and disadvantages of Nix properly.

When you learn Nix and how it works, it is incredibly powerful. Being able to version your entire OS with one configuration is incredible. Old software that messes things up just doesn’t exist. It’s easy to explore new software, configurations, and upgrades and roll back to your old state seamlessly. No more “well I deleted an environment variable and now my performance is 50% worse and I don’t even remember what that environment variable was named or where it should live.” With Nix, you can switch from i3 to Hyprland, try it out for a day, and then switch back to your old configuration seamlessly and easily.

The disadvantages are that you need to know Nix (the programming language and configuration file syntax) to do it, and they are complicated. Worth it in my opinion but it’s not easy.

Every other distro is basically different from Nix because of this, as you will be configuring them manually to a greater or lesser extent. I find that manual configuration to be annoying and I always had to create tools to help version my configs properly before Nix. But it is certainly easier to do since you just have to understand the software you’re installing and how to configure it. In Nix, you have to understand both that, and Nix.

I think it’s totally worth it. But only you can make that call for you.

I don’t think your distro choice matters for your desktop ease of use… If I were to choose distros, I’d choose NixOS… but that’s because I’m a NixOS user :P

Are you familiar with Fedora Silverblue or Universal Blue? It's, in some ways, a halfway point between nix and Fedora. Another way to put it is that it builds on existing paradigms to create a declarative system based on Fedora.

Have you tried Manjaro Sway? Felt much more polished than i3. Sadly, barrier isn't working and that was a dealbreaker for me. But you should give it a try.

In my experience, a good way to get a polished desktop with a tiling workflow is to use KDE / GNOME with a few extensions & i3 shortcuts. Unless you really care about customizing every part of your DE, the work of configuring i3 to match a proper DE in terms of polish might not be worth it.

I previously used GNOME with the Forge extension and a few simple extensions for a workspace indicator, disabling the workspace switch animation, etc. This worked quite well but since GNOME is not very configurable, you have to do a lot of that through extensions (e.g. disabling the workspace switch animation & popup). This is particularly annoying since GNOME updates tend to break extensions.

For that reason, I recently switched to KDE. Polonium is a very nice tiling plugin for it. Since KDE is pretty customizable, I didn't really need a lot of other extensions to support my workflow. It's mainly a matter of configuring keyboard shortcuts and a few other settings. I haven't used KDE long enough to say how stable everything is under updates, but from what I've heard it should be a lot better than GNOME.

I personally use NixOS and Home Manager with the Plasma Manager module for KDE. It's a steep learning curve but if you have fun learning new stuff it is worth it in my opinion.

Otherwise, a GNOME / KDE tiling setup will probably also be mostly reproducible if you just track your dot files. There's always a bit of manual configuration but it's also difficult to completely avoid that with NixOS (although probably possible).

I’d suggest seriously considering nixos. I just now made the switch so I might change my mind of course. But so far really impressed and I feel I’m just getting into the good stuff.

I also prefer using i3 and polishing the system myself, and considering I maintain two different systems with almost identical configurations nixos seems fantastic.

I started with installing nixos in a vm and started tinkering. When I had a decent system set up I installed it on my next system. It took me less then 30 minutes to be up and running with the same software and configurations. Only had to make a few driver additions and kernel settings.

Took me a couple of hours reading up and checking different configs. I recommend reading https://zero-to-nix.com

I’d try out Hyprland or Sway with nwg-shell.

You can install NixOS's package manager (called nix) to other linux distros and even MacOS, so you can kind of bring any nix skills to other os's.