I'm expecting to receive my shiny new Framework 16 laptop in the new year. It will be my main workhorse/development machine. I vacillate between learning Nix and giving that a go, or sticking with Arch+Ansible to manage it.

I use NixOS as a daily driver. (My previous Linux of choice had been Arch).

I'd describe Nix as 95% wonderful, 5% hugely painful.

I learned Nix by using it on macOS/Linux before trying NixOS. I was concerned that NixOS would be very difficult to use.

It was easier to use NixOS than I expected; the main problems I ran into were when a tool would helpfully download some kind of binary, but since NixOS doesn't put its shared libraries where other Linuxes do, these programs wouldn't work. -- Though, for a popular-enough tool, most likely someone else already has a Nix package written that helps out.

There are other "escape hatches". e.g. I think something like distrobox could be used if native-on-NixOS stuff has problems. https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Nix can otherwise be difficult if you need to write some Nix code. There are several concepts in Nix which are foreign enough to how things have been done before; e.g. when building a package, it won't have access to $HOME; but, recent language tooling will often want access to $HOME. -- If something goes wrong, you may often need a wider and deeper understanding compared to if something goes wrong on a more typical Linux distribution.

For as difficult as it is, the trade-offs Nix makes are essentially "I'm going to put in a lot of effort now, so that I don't have to put in effort some time later". (This favours Nix when "effort later" is multiplied many times).

Overall, as a choice for "I need this to work right now", I'd recommend against NixOS (especially for someone who doesn't know Nix).