If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.

But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.

You don't miss out on anything if it does what you need.

For me apt is just slow and clunky, don't like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.

I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.

I liked portage because it worked with program's sources so I was able to just remove part's of program's and their dependencies I didn't need.

I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.

Am I missing out?

Borking your system I guess. /j

Nah, apt is great. I use Arch, but the package manager does not make a difference for me. I think I'd prefer apt for the user friendly terms to use it: apt search, apt install, apt remove, apt purge. Much nicer than the pacman equivalents I haven't even bother to learn.

Seems like a fine idea, but nixos is just exactly what I want from a distro it turns out and nix is just the package manager I wanted but never knew I did.

I don't think OSTree systems can quite reach the flexibility of NixOS. For instance with NixOS (with direnv and nix-shells) you can essentially swap out your running system based on the different directories you enter and I think that's still just scraping the top of the iceberg. From my experience with OSTree (which is admittedly somewhat limited) I don't think you can reach that level of flexibility.

It's still really cool, I don't mean to shit on that, I'm just saying NixOS and OSTree have different pros and cons and use cases.

I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess I’m just old-fashioned)… I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)

That's fine when you need only one or two things, but when you wan't your whole system to be up to date as much as possible it becomes tedious.

I mostly just searched nixos how to package pyrhon/go/rust/ program or nixos how to package sddm theme/gtk/...

The best resource honestly are the randon blogposts since the wiki itself is really bad.

I also recommend the channel vimjoyer.

I also recommend to get into the habit of searching for options on https://search.nixos.org/options and for packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages which are great resources to know what you can set or install and already packages.

You can also check my nixos config on examples for how to package sddm theme and shell scripts.

I also have a couple programs on my selfhosted gitea that use flakes for packaging which you can checkout also.

https://code.cronyakatsuki.xyz/crony/nixos