The most notable changes are probably HDR and color management, but most people can’t take advantage of it anyway. Although the list of changes includes many quality of life improvements like enabling tap to click by default.

https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6

For me most of my needs would be met by Fedora Kinoite and nix for cli tools in addition to distrobox. Auto updates and rollbacks work flawlessly.

The following nix installer has support for immutable distros like Kinoite (rpm-ostree) and SteamOS. [1]

[1] https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

Also, uBlue is based on Fedora rpm-ostree and allows for customizing the image with Containerfiles. [2]

[2] https://universal-blue.org/

The biggest problem with NixOS is how there’s a lack of build servers to actually crank out various builds, which means the testing pipeline is kind of constipated, which means getting large stacks such as Plasma 6 into nixpkgs binary repos will take time. If you want it NAO, then you’ll have to use some weird nixpkgs branch and compile the stack on your machine, sort of like Gentoo.

GNOME 45 still hasn’t made it to nixpkgs-unstable even, and is currently in the works of being merged after testing has succeeded. I’m hoping it’ll be released with NixOS 23.11.

Tbf nixpkgs-unstable is actually pretty stable, and nixos-23.05 is just a 6 month older variant. They should rename the branch nixpkgs-unstable to nixos-rolling, because the package are not the latest, most unstable libraries and applications. But even as rolling goes, the testing pipeline is again a bit constipated.