I wanted to be a hacker as a kid, so I had some experience with Backtrack 5. A prof said if you wanted to be a cowboy coder, do everything in your terminal. That was good advice, I’ve learned a lot about OS’s from that

Your OS is basically a set of drivers that allow you to leverage your hardware, as well as a package manager for managing your software, and a system for managing services (like at startup or by some event trigger)

I’m an advanced user but NixOS has been an excellent OS, it’s like all the fun of tuning arch but with less elbow grease. I was a kde neon (ubuntu base + plasma display manager + KDE desktop environment) user before