NixOS isn’t easy to use. It’s very powerful though. It gives you the ability to configure your whole OS, including all of your packages and configurations, in one declarative file. It reproduces the entire installation from this file in a way that’s fully immutable and hash-perfect (with minimal building from source). Very cool.
Which is not always up to date, and exposes all the available options. I found myself often need to dig into nixpkgs and add missing options myself during the time I was trying out NixOS.
And believe me, that wasn't a pleasant experience.
Not sure if it was available when you tried, but this is useful when configuring, it is processed from nixpkgs and indexes all options that are available: https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html
I tried that initially but never spent enough time using it in a VM to really learn it.
In the end, I just decided to take the plunge and set it up as my main OS after a year of procrastinating around trying it out. I've been using it for about 4 years now, and wouldn't go back to a traditional distro.
And finally, 4 years on, I just set up a new laptop and it was much easier than its ever been before. I just had to copy over my existing nix config, and nix built out the whole configuration and my user environment (with home-manager [0]). It's always been a bit of a pain setting up my profile before this, and maintaining my .emacs.d, etc; now it's all managed.
