I would recommend trying home-manager, or just plain nix profiles before going all-in on NixOS, it's very easy to add Nix on top of any Linux (and MacOS to an extent).
This way you still have your tried and true base system and you can manage things somewhat like you're used to (and use venv and whatever bullshit package manager everyone invents), a lot of common tools will work poorly on NixOS (venv, npm...)and while they have Nix alternatives that are "better" it's DIFFERENT.
I run NixOS on desktop and laptop but I wouldn't recommend starting with it, you can benefit from all packages on any distro by just installing Nix.
Also home-manager adoption can be incremental.
ADHD end note: home-manager is perfect for CLI tools installation and config. You must unconfigure "secure path" in sudo though otherwise your CLI tools don't work with sudo
I would recommend trying home-manager, or just plain nix profiles before going all-in on NixOS, it's very easy to add Nix on top of any Linux (and MacOS to an extent).
This way you still have your tried and true base system and you can manage things somewhat like you're used to (and use venv and whatever bullshit package manager everyone invents), a lot of common tools will work poorly on NixOS (venv, npm...)and while they have Nix alternatives that are "better" it's DIFFERENT.
I run NixOS on desktop and laptop but I wouldn't recommend starting with it, you can benefit from all packages on any distro by just installing Nix.
Also home-manager adoption can be incremental.
ADHD end note: home-manager is perfect for CLI tools installation and config. You must unconfigure "secure path" in sudo though otherwise your CLI tools don't work with sudo