I shifted to NixOS over three weeks ago, and I found myself pretty content with most of the things regarding NixOS (if not all the things). But I ended up stumbled with packaging some complicated packages such as intel-i915-backport-dkms equivalent from AUR and the fact that my file manager won’t recognize any application that I installed from home-manager as an application that can open files (Nautilus). So, exhausted from configuring everything by hand, I am trying to see if there are NixOS distributions that work, like Manjaro i3/sway editions, compared to Arch.
You can disable repositories with proprietary firmware, or you can rebuild the kernel. I rebuilt the kernel. It looks a lot like NixOS.