I feel like some NixOS users miss the mark and end up saying a bunch of buzz words or a list of features without describing the true value of NixOS because they are presumably too enamored with such a magnificent creation. I run NixOS on two machines currently and have been running it for around 6 months.

The use case for NixOS is for extreme stability and organization while preserving customization. You can, like many in the comments have already described, setup entire desktop environments in a few lines of Nix code and know everything your system has installed and configured at a glance (makes maintaining wayyy easier). However, all of this customization takes time. You might find really easy when doing one thing, but really hard and seemingly unnecessary for another. Notably, installing software that hasn’t been packaged for Nix yet can vary in difficulty when taking into account the different languages used to make it. How one of my friends said

I would genuinely love to use it more but it takes the “Linux is free if you don’t value your time” meme to the max with the learning curve

As for the two systems of mine running NixOS, one is a desktop computer I run as a server, and the other is an effectively a school laptop. I don’t intend changing their configurations all that often in the future because they’re just supposed to work without the need to maintain them. For NixOS there is always an added step when trying to do a lot of things, and that is why I don’t run it on my development/general computer. If I want to install or try out a newer piece of software, I don’t want to go through the gymnastics that one must on NixOS. I just want to install whatever development libraries exist, build, and run it. That doesn’t mean I don’t like NixOS, but my use case for it are systems that need to be stable and reproducible since I put a lot of time into setting them up.

Recently, my school laptop’s cheap hard drive that randomly disconnected got corrupted (who would’ve guessed), and so I reinstalled NixOS and my configuration on a newer, better drive in a matter of two hours. All of the software I had even packaged myself installed perfectly on my system with no problem. Almost nothing had changed and everything worked great.

So, in conclusion, NixOS is awesome, but its not for everyone and its not for every use case.