This is niche and HN is full of these back and forth comments. One thing which a particular type of crowd will appreciate is being able to apply simple patches to constantly-up-to-date packages.

For an example, I love atuin but it, by default, skips commands starting with space. Currently it's not configurable and while I wait for time to submit a PR or for the issue to be resolved, make a single line `patch` which just removes the part of the `if` statement which checks if it starts with space. So easy, took 5 minutes (also had to comment out 1 test).

And now on home-manager debian or nixos server, I get up to date atuin with that one patch. It downloads rust, etc, compiles, and then that's garbage collected away

Same but with kernel. What lead me to nixos: company gave me a laptop with iGPU that wasn't supported by any released linux kernel. There were patches waiting to be merged, with nixOS making an installer image that supports my machine was simple.