mostly i'm trying to get out of the terminal and most IDEs don't understand devbox/distrobox well without lots of finagling.

Why Nix is great; you can run the IDE from within a Nix-managed dev environment and not have to teach the IDE about it. You can point a .desktop shortcut at it too.

Requires a different way of working with projects though, so understandable if that's not your thing.