If you want to go beyond writing a configuration.nix then you don't want a beginner friendly anything. Configuration.nix does at least as much as any user-friendly operating system does.
Quite a lot of the beginner-unfriendliness of NixOS is from the need to write your own packages. It's got the biggest repo out of all distros, but it's still pretty easy to need software that isn't in nixpkgs. Even easier if you're developing software, since then you need a Nix derivation to have a development environment which can build your software.
SAI_Peregrinus|1 year ago