I'm completely missing. I have searched arpund and I have some solutions, but back in my head, some people have something else.
The part before Ansible or puppet to kick in.
2) Debian
When I wanted to set up NixOS, I wanted to use it to manage a bunch of NixOS virtual machines (so, nixops), and then run a couple of services. Here are a few points from my anecdotal experience:
1. Learn an entirely new language that has absolutely horrendous documentation. It used to be (I've been told it got better but I abandoned Nix before this) extremely difficult to debug as well, since oftentimes you would get an error in some library file when the error was obviously in your own file.
2. Try packaging your own stuff. Again, barely any documentation. One time, I wrote a simple Rails application in a day. It took me more than three days to figure out how to deploy it, and that involved just figuring it out. Rails adds a PID file to the directory with your Ruby code in it, but that directory in a Nix derivation (fancy [which makes it harder] name for something like package from my understanding) is immutable. Good luck packaging complicated projects that someone else hasn't packaged yet.
3. Nixops was so incredibly outdated that it caused my server to say it was using an "insecure" library from Python 2.7 and my auto updates started failing. On paper, nixops looked nice (manage NixOS virtual machines/VPSes with Nix). But it broke my updates. I eventually wrote my own replacement for Nixops, which worked, but I still don't trust the rest of NixOS to not break. The tool might have some merit on a different Linux distribution, though. (I'd also note that I believe that nixops fixed their insecurity bug, but there were a myriad of other issues I don't remember that I had with nixops)
4. Setting up pre-packaged services sounds easy. They were, somewhat. But permission errors were pervasive. SystemD tempfiles were finnicky at best and gave path traversal errors that were extremely hard to debug.
Eventually, I got a new server, installed Arch on it, and use docker-compose for everything. It takes me maybe 20 minutes to set up a new service on a good day, instead of four hours of Googling for some obscure error from NixOS. While not perfectly "reproducible," neither was NixOS, because I could simply not trust a virtual machine on nixops to boot successfully—there would always be more required even if it worked once.
I might be open to NixOS on a desktop, though.
I run NixOS, but I recognize that user experiences might be very different depending on the packages you use. NixPkgs is huge, enormous. Some stuff is really well maintained, whereas other stuff isn't.
Furthermore, declarative systems make a difficulty tradeoff. Lots of stuff is much easier, but problems are sometimes harder to debug as there's an extra abstraction layer.
IMHO, these days the best distributions out there are either very simple imperative ones with binaries (Arch, Alpine, etc.) or Nix-like (NixOS and GuixSD). Getting experience in those two extremes is really valuable.
