NixOS is as mature as arch, I'd say, but because of its nature it has issues here and there, but rarely so.
That said, the learning curve for nix/nixos is very very very steep, so good luck learning. It took me a while for me to use it nicely, and even then, I'm nothing more than a beginner. Even so, I'm quite comfortable and pretty much can't use any other linux distro.
That's nice. Hopefully it getting more notorious means that HW companies will support it better. But, at the same time, if this is just from the Steam Deck, then, kinda fugged
I dont have links in hand, but I remember the flatpak devs saying they targeted/care about desktop gui apps. It's one of the reasons why I won't use flatpaks anytime soon if ever
I only use Gentoo for a small bit, so I can't comment on it, and I haven't used the other thing ever. I wish linux a culture similar to the bsds when it came to ports stuff. /usr/local is barely used if ever.
I am only using them and they seem very kino. I don't do anything complex with them, but, I like that adding new repos is as simple as reponame.url = repourl and then you can use its stuff after adding it to your outputs
It's so kino. Incredibly hard to learn and much more to master, but much more powerful. Nothing beats easily modifying a derivation's source, or adding patches or build options or whatever you want.
Things are getting better as snaps and flatpaks gain popularity, but both of those systems have lots of issues of their own, and arguably aren’t anywhere near as good as a proper native package for your distro. Flatpaks don’t really work for CLI tools. Snaps are stupidly slow. Both snaps and flatpaks still struggle with theming. Applications installed with either take up way more space than their natively-packaged equivalents.
Flatpaks would beat native packages if they didn't have a trillion papercuts and issues. I'm on NixOS because I want to avoid using flatpak.
link me