Seems like a nice distro! Iwouldn't use it because I don't want to go back to a "regular" distro after using NixOS, but I'll definitely recommend it to friends. Too bad it doesn't have an RSS feed for the news...
For distributing software (nixpkgs is a flake and many projects have flakes), replacing channels (again, nixpkgs is a flake) or managing configs (check out my repo)
They're more reproducible, they make dependency management easier, the commands you use with them are easier to use and more readable, and it's easier to have multiple packages/systems/home-manager profiles in a single git repo. They also make version management easier
My config is in a single github repo for all of my machines and my user.
It's really tightly integrated and just works with the nix package manager, which has a huge repo and builds packages reproducibly, so theoretically what would work on my machine would also work on yours. Also, with nix you can run software without installing it, you can have multiple versions of the same library, and there are way more benefits just from this package manager that I can't list here.
You can iteratively test your config, apply it on a live system and roll it back. You can also use git to roll back to an older version while keeping the actual source files.
There's no dependency hell / leftover packages after uninstalling something - what you declare in your config is what is installed, and if an app has unspecified dependencies it won't build. I guess this would also be a part of #2
And there are probably other benefits I can't remember.
If the person who posts on mastodon mentions a community on lemmy, their toot appears as a post in that community on lemmy. It happened on !thunder_app@lemmy.world
+1 for nix. I use it daily, and it's great. A lot of apps are packaged in nixpkgs, too.