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.
I would think that a similar concept to a nixOS distro would be, like, someone else’s configuration where they got your Nvidia card working. You could then just import that and stick whatever else you wanted in it from your own config and sudo nixos-rebuild switch
How interesting. Arch users began to switch to NixOS en masse. At the same time, they are trying to measure NixOS by Arch Linux standards. Unfortunately, the concept of NixOS is closer to Gentoo, Slackware or Guix than to conventional binary distributions like Arch Linux. There is Guix, which is an ideological successor to the ideas of NixOS, plus you cannot use it on equipment with non-free drivers without rebuilding the kernel. Guix uses the Lisp language. For those who are familiar with it, it is much easier to write their modules than in the built-in NixOS language.
There are lots of adjustments that Arch users have to make when they come over to NixOS. One is that with Arch, there’s more of an expectation that you will go it alone, using the famously comprehensive documentation. Whereas with NixOS, where the documentation is famously bad, you’re better off asking questions. If there are specific issues that are causing you trouble, you might want ask about them either here or on the NixOS discourse.
Idk if it works better but it’s a paradigm that offer many new solutions to NixOS problems, r/Guix