Well, dummy plugs are also kinda useful on windows - can’t seamlessly switch to client’s resolution without setting up the resolution profiles first, and that requires a device to apply the profiles to.
Also, you can create virtual displays fairly easy on Xorg, but yes, the entire sunshine setup is infinitely easier on windows.
Who cares if it breaks? You can always just boot a previous generation! Need to rebuild without the breakage? You surely must now how to add a package from an earlier commit via flakes by now, right?
Well, if you can’t figure out how to integrate the flake in 30 seconds by month 6, you clearly have a skill issue. Or a “sleeping at night instead of writing nix” issue. Better use a noob-friendly distro like arch.
Seriously though, despite all the flaws, there is no other packaging system where I can as painlessly use random forks of packages. I absolutely love how I’m able to run gnome-mobile on my x64 tablet. True to the NixOS way, I found the overlay on someone’s GitHub, there were only the files, no further instructions.
I also have a USB with live debian at all times, because you never know when you stumble upon a thing that just can’t work with NixOS
Who needs documentation? The code is self-documenting! The entire thing’s on GitHub, just check the issues to figure out what’s going on! Didn’t work? Sorry, the thing got broke a few months ago. Just go through the commit history and I’m sure you’ll be up and running in no time!
I’ve also made a module that fixes your specific issue and uploaded it to my self hosted gitlab instance. The server is down right now? Well, isn’t that better? Now you can make the thing yourself! Remember to upload your thing to your GitHub, name it something like “nixos” and never mention it anywhere.
if you already have an esim on the phone it will not be wiped during installation - esims reside on a completely separate chip.
all “difficult to set up” information is exactly about that - setting up, that, in any case, is just about enabling specific google services that you can disable afterwards.
my phone has about 5 esims installed, I regularly wipe my phone, they are unaffected.
Complex things that someone has already done are infinitely easier in nixos - stuff like having zfs as root filesystem is literally two lines in the config (and the magic is that it is very, very hard to break).
Complex things that are your own edge case will make you want to pull your hair out - I wanted to run immich on a raspberry pi 5 with native 16k page size, long story short, I still don’t have immich.
On the other hand, if by “normie” you mean “running a browser and some flatpaks”, nixos is likely the best distro that will work right out of the box - the graphical installer will generate a good config, the out of the box hardware support is the best in my experience, breakage is almost impossible. Automatic updates will not work though and there’s no gui that will prompt you to do so at all.