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Curious, does one need to use nixOS for an optimal experience?

I've been using debian for a long time and would prefer not to have to switch OSs but the idea of using nix for having full control over my package graph is very tempting.

I've been somewhat procrastinating on trying nix as I've heard GNU Guix has a similar feature set and haven't been able to decide on which one to dive into...

My ideal setup would be to just be able to run a single shell script that configures a new machine to the exact state of all my other dev machines. I have a shell script that somewhat does this but it's not completely unattended and still requires a lot of manual config for certain steps.

Aside from that my main use case is being able to easily share a dev/build environment with others for ensuring that they can compile a certain project exactly as I do. For now I just use docker but it's frustrating not having explicit control over the layer cache and being able to tell it what to cache and what not to.

[ris]

> Curious, does one need to use nixOS for an optimal experience?

My experience: no. I've been very happily using Nix on debian for years. Debian gives me my boring desktop apps (I have very very boring tastes), almost all my tinkering and development starts with drawing all the prerequisites from Nix.

The only times you get weirdness from using non-NixOS linux are things like running opengl apps, which simply require a wrapper script like `nixGL` to function properly.

And darwin Nix is just about the only thing that makes macos a bearable platform for me.