literally just use a normal distribution and 80% of your problems stop existing. anything not derived from Debian, Red Hat, or OpenSUSE is just a waste of your time.
I've used Ubuntu/Debian as a daily driver since I was like... ten?
I still don't really know how apt and dpkg work. I have no idea how to "use" systemd. PulseAudio/ALSA/JACK may as well be a black box to me. This has yet to be a real problem for me. I've never needed to intimately understand them. It just hasn't come up. They just work, or they don't work and you run apt -f install or log out and log in again and then they work again. it's fine. it's whatever. they just work. I feel like Linux doesn't get enough credit for that.
I'm a huge NixOS shill but I don't think it's use case is as a desktop operating system. It's much better suited as production operating system.
not gonna lie. it's really nice to be in that position. it is not the experience of people who aren't strange and broken in the ways we are (this is "broken" in a positive sense)
but yeah we for sure use NixOS for everything including things where we know that's going to cause a lot of trouble
we also do things like compiling our own bootloader, heavily customizing our window manager, disabling all the standard functionality we can, intentionally adding additional password prompts to things, deploying five experimental features together none of which works properly even on its own, all that
years ago we once had to write our own partition table repair tool, while booted into a LiveCD without persistent storage, because we got ourselves into a mess where we had only one computer and it wouldn't boot. see, the thing is we get ourselves into things but then we also get ourselves out of things, and at the end of the day it's fond memories.
just pretty inconvenient when we need things to, like, WORK
