For me, NixOS feels like something from the 2010s. I used it a bit about a decade ago. It’s great and powerful, but still pretty niche and not for everyone. Right now I’m on Bazzite, which seems to aim for the same goals but in a much easier and more forgiving way.

If I really need to overlay something onto the system, I can use rpm-ostree, but that’s rare since almost everything I need runs fine in toolbox or distrobox. Using those is super easy and forgiving—it’s basically like having super-efficient containers where you can mess around without worrying about breaking the host OS.

Personally, I mostly stick to a single Ubuntu distrobox, where I build graphical/audio/gaming apps from source and just launch them directly from the container—they work perfectly. Distrobox feels like having as many Debians, Arch installs, or Fedoras as you want, all running at near-native efficiency. Toolbox is similar, but I use it more for system-level stuff that would otherwise require rpm-ostree —like being able to run dnf in a sandboxed way that can’t mess anything up.