Nix is awesome. The last time I ran it stuff like gnome-shell wasn't packaged, which made it hard to use for a desktop (they did have a number of window managers packaged though).

That's the hardest part about nix right now (the lack of packaged software). It is pretty easy to write your own packages for basic software though (and the Nix project is good about taking pull requests).

Looks like gnome3 is packaged now, I'll have to give it another shot: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/s...