> keep GUI apps and casual tools imperative, and treat Nix as the source of truth for the stuff that actually blocks you from doing work

I landed somewhere similar for gaming.

When I first got my Legion Go, there were a whole bunch of gaming distros, but none was more popular than the other. I read a bit about immutability, got curious, and installed Jovian-NixOS (which is to NixOS what Bazzite is to Fedora).

I liked that it gave me the Steam Deck experience on unofficial hardware, and it was neat to be able to play with e.g. replacing the desktop shell. However, a keyboard-centric configuration scheme is a bad pairing for a touch-centric device. Little things, like changing the timezone, became needlessly frictionful.

Now I'm on the official SteamOS, with Nix as the package manager. It seems to be a good pairing. Nix lets me install Linux utilities on Steam's otherwise-immutable filesystem. And I can use the Steam UI to change things like the time.

I'll probably write an article in the next few weeks on using Nix to make Linux-native copies of Windows-built games.