nix is like the i3 of package managers. does it work sure but you’ll spend your 80% of your time learning code and configuration to make your sick packaging rice /sarcasm
please please please avoid an LTS (long term support) distro for desktop use, especially if gaming. this includes Linux mint which is based on Ubuntu LTS. the packages are painfully old and cause problems playing the latest games, particularly where they don’t work out of the box with lutris/proton/wine etc. LTS is great for servers and workstations but not end users
experienced users can make any distro work including LTS but it’s extra overhead for new folks
if you’re trying out one or more than one DE I suggest making a new user for it, I’ve accidently messed up my dotfiles more times while DE hopping than I’d like to recall
my lug tries to help people trying to run lutris on old LTS versions and for one example we ended up having to tell them to use some .deb for lutris since ubuntu shipped a broken lutris version for a year or whatever users should always be able to depend on their package manager alone instead of side loading content. even had instances of their version of wget or curl being incompatible with winetricks and gitlab and githubs apis