NixOS is a Linux distro that does a lot of things differently (for the greater good), and gaming is heavily Windows thing, which is hard to do even on conventional Linux distros (its getting better tho). That said as for your points:

1a. One of the things that would help you, is programs.nix-ld.enable = true; (for more info check https://github.com/Mic92/nix-ld , but its integrated in NixOS already)

1b. UE5 pull request has some things that might help (eg: you could just try running it with steam-run): https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/124963

2. Depends how you are building them, I am not a gaming developer nor tried to build a game without packaging it with Nix. But if you manage to run the UE5 I guess the procedure would be the same as long as you have all of the dependencies available for UE5

3. I am using qemu/KVM on NixOS to run games on with quite a good performance, so that should not be a problem

Thank you, integration with activitypub is what i was after!

Stop making a list and start with eg: Nix Pills

Dont know where you are getting this. Nixpkgs is a breeze to manage compared to apt repo. Also it does not matter if you are on nixos or non-nixos system, the only difference is that nix does not take care of services on its own. What kind of docs do you miss? Nix has its own extensive nix docs page, and for packaging you also have nixpkgs documentation page - also official and not much related to nixos itself. Also nix has quite good man pages.

As an ~10 year old NixOS user I appreciate your take on image based distros. My start into NixOS was not based on immutable OS, it was survivability of OS. I was searching for NixOS before I knew what NixOS is. I wanted some system that would survive me and my constant discovery of new software. It was impossible at the time and I had to reinstall whole distro every few months. I started with NixOS like with any other software - I started using it because … Curiosity. 10years ago there were no documentation or guides on the internet, everything was in the Nix code, i was reading the code until my eyes bled, for months. Eventually I figured out that even if i play around with kernel modules, I simply can not brick this OS.

Some time back (a year or two) I was using Fedora Silverblue on my work pc… because I thought that will be more supported in terms of software that can run on the system. Boy oh boy I was wrong. For every system package i had to reboot, package management UI was for Flatpak, to install userlevel packages I had to use some other way… And to make things worse… It died on me some day after upgrade… I switched to NixOS. Smooth sailing ever since…

Software:

• firewall, no inbound and do outbound restrictions
• use immutable OS
• full disk encryption (keep in mind that in many setups you will need to be beside the computer after restart)

Hardware:

• put it in the trusted datacenter (home stuff is not safe from teenagers and people that need computer’s electrical socket for a vacuum cleaner)

I use Sway to great success. Gnome extensions are quite limited. Hyprland seems ok but the time that i was trying to use it (several months back) it had severe issues in release and trunk revisions. Specially with multimonitor setup, like the screen locker that they recommend in documentation is crashing after sleep if on multimonitor setup, i lost trust in Hyprland after that security issue.

I cant remember anymore… Let me explain … My first computer was with at-the-time-very-new windows xp, using primary for games, after some time it got bloated with stuff so i had to reinstall again and again over time. Then i discovered redhat,centos and debian… I started heavily distro hopping. My passion for software grew to the point that I was installing new software on daily basis, just to explore new things. But nothing seemed stable enough, ubuntu, fedora, sabayon, gentoo, arch… And their derivatives all broke under my fingers to the point that i had to do more fixing than discovering new software, I took it as a challenge and continue. At around the time of university I discovered NixOS, as with any new technology I went head on with it. It took a lot of trial and error since at the time there were no documentation for any of it. I spent months reading the code, but I never gave up, since what I have found was a gem. I found the OS that is resistant to my curiosity, I just cant seem to be able to break it. Now I use NixOS everywhere that I can, even on my work computer. I do not need to reinstall after initial installation. Well… only when hardware fails…

I knew that takos have a lot of output energy, but I did not knew that takos can power a whole car!

(I wish that someone would already posted something like this so I could just upvote it.)

I was a distro hopper once, then I saw the light of NixOS…