I really want to like both nixOS and their nix package manager, but so far I'm not there yet. from a PM perspective, it seems like anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don't really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I'll def be playing with it again.