It’s not so much about being “smart” to figure it out, it’s more like it needs to “click” with you. At first you’ll think it’s stupid, you’ll think it’s a tedious way to do things and configure your system. Then you’ll do something and it’ll suddenly be like “oooooh I get it now, oh man that’s awesome!”. That’s NixOS.

It’s not a distro I recommend to people, it’s one you just have to play around with yourself to see if you like it or not. But I will say I’ve found that the majority of people who do switch to it, it’s the last distro they use. Like I’ll spend a week on something else every few months to try it but I always go back to NixOS now. I just can’t use any other distro long term anymore.

Honestly I don’t think nixos is harder than other advanced distros, its just very different. For instance I’ve used nixos for a while now but I’ve never been able to get a working arch install, even following the guide. I think in a lot of ways nixos is easier because to fix a problem you don’t have to go digging through config files and esoteric shell commands, you usually just have to modify your config and rebuild. The biggest problem is that nix documentation is terrible. I would recommend trying it out in a low stakes environment like a vm using the graphical installer, then just poking around the config file and figuring out what stuff does. Also, as a replacement for good documentation there are some good guides online. I’ve been enjoying guides by tonybtw.com, his videos as well as vimjoyer and no boilerplate on youtube are great

Maybe start in a VM, get things how you want, then copy your config. It just takes time reading through self documenting code^^