Honestly for me I have to add code to my NixOS configuration to add a service anyways, and adding a reverse proxy alongside is like literally 5 lines of code, so I’m fine with it!
Thanks ended up doing a wildcard dns entry but not with Nginx Proxy Manager but with Caddy. On NixOS I can just add like 3 lines of code to declare a reverse proxy for a specific service in the same file where I enable same service.
Also not sure what you mean by your configuration struggles. Never had that happen. Also worth mentioning, my macbook runs Full Disk Encryption which needs my Yubikey to unlock, and I also have impermanence - everything (outside of a few specified directories like ~/Downloads) gets wiped on a reboot, so that my configuration is as reproducible as it can be. I could pretty much reinstall the system and have everything be 100% the same.
I run NixOS on my macbook with the stack above. If you want to you could check out my NixOS config, but I’m using a configuration framework so it’s a bit complicated.
https://github.com/n3oney/nixus
See configs/vic and hosts/vic for macbook-specific configs, everything else in my NixOS config is shared between machines and I opt into it per-machine in configs/
I like NixOS and haven’t had any struggles with it. For my tiling I use Hyprland, as it’s Wayland and looks very nice. For a bar with amazing configuration I can recommend either https://github.com/elkowar/eww or https://github.com/aylur/ags - in the first one you configure it in a lisp-like language, the second one is configured in JS. They both allow you to pretty much write any GTK widgets for your bar, and are really powerful, but ags is newer and allows for more advanced functionality.
My favorite terminal emulator is foot - it’s simple and quick.
I wouldn’t say Nix is easy at the beginning as you have to learn a language to use it properly, but it’s definitely worth it long-term.
There shouldn’t be any issues with 2 keyboards and custom layouts on Linux. If anything you could use something like hawck to rebind the keys (system-wide) to something else.
Passed with 1 minor!