Preface
The critiques to the GNOME experience seem very particular to switch to an entirely Linux distribution.
My following comments aren’t to to make you back out on your decision, but as I’ve actually tailored the default Gnome experience in NixOS, I believe I should commentate on them.
Not wanting to edit configuration files?
I didn’t need to edit any configuration files
If you dislike even using the Nix language I don’t think NixOS is for you.
I feel in the future, if we had a graphical interface for these things, NixOS would be much more practical for the average user.
The GNOME experience
Vanilla?
Manjaro ships with a nicer Gnome experience out of the box.
We decided on having the defaults to be vary “Vanilla” in NixOS because NixOS is a very general purpose distribution.
We actually align almost completely with what upstream recommends:
Which I believe is the SDK used in GNOME OS.
I’m confused about the critique about things being vanilla in general.
Another distro that has lots of points for users ease of use is Fedora, and it’s about just as vanilla as ours.
Doesn’t ship GNOME Tweaks?
Manjaro’s Gnome flavor ships with Gnome Tweaks
Umm, you can install gnome-tweaks? :shrug
environment.systemPackages = [
pkgs.gnome3.gnome-tweaks
];
And let’s investigate how this is completely different than installing any package with pacman is like.
With the above configuration, your system will always have gnome-tweaks. It will have gnome-tweaks wherever this configuration is realized. If you change your nixpkgs revision (update nixos) and this package is broken you wouldn’t be able to realize your configuration. You could install NixOS and twenty different machines with this configuration, and it will have the same result everywhere.
That’s the paradigm shift in NixOS, and that’s in managing your setup declaratively. You don’t just have to rely on things being there because the developers decided that what was going to be included by default. You can then instead, formulate your own exact profile for the experience you want on your machine, and can replicate that on any machine with Nix. I don’t think many, if any, distro’s offer this kind of functionality in the bones of the system.
Doesn’t have enough extensions/themes out of the box?
and a bigger variety of popular Gnome Extensions and Themes available out of the box.
This is rather disappointing to think that my competition in other distros is that they have more themes packaged for you to use right away. You can also do packaging requests on GitHub, and while there’s no guarantee it will be packaged, it could happen.
Another thing that NixOS actually makes pretty easy is extending nixpkgs with more packages.
This is a feature in NixOS Nixpkgs Reference Manual.
Apps that want it (like Slack, Chromium, and others) get their task icon placed in the top right of the task bar thanks to the knotifier extension, and clicking the icons reveals options for controlling the application. It’s a “system tray” so to speak.
Yeah, Gnome killed that functionality a while ago. So IMHO, GNOME distributors shouldn’t even tailor to accommodate for this. All things mentioned above ^ apply, it’s just an extension to install.
Nice Shell and GTK themes out of the box in Manjaro, while NixOS only has the default theme (with modified logo and background).
Is GNOME Adwaita not nice? I guess Manjaro has a custom theme.
GDM Issues?
Normally the GDM login screen should show a button for my user profile that I can click on (or hit enter) then type my password (this is the default Gnome GDM experience), but in NixOS I have to manually enter my username in a text field for some reason. GDM works fine in Manjaro.
Never encountered this bug, but I suspect it has something to do with an issue with AccountsService and Logind maybe in 19.09. Would love to see a bug report from anyone here who’s experienced it.
Hard to setup a desktop environment?
it takes more work to properly set up a desktop environment in NixOS.
Plus it is easy to install the desktop environment the wrong way, as there are multiple good and bad ways to install things in NixOS.
This is easily the most confusing comment for me.
To install a desktop environment in NixOS, is probably as simple as it could get anywhere.
services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome3.enable = true;
services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable = true;
And nixos-rebuild and you’re done.
In other distro’s, all you’re dealing with is packages. Using Xfce, for example, in Manjaro is just a matter of installing a metapackage. It’s true there’s multiple ways to install things in NixOS, but Xfce isn’t a package in NixOS to install.
Closing
I see so many Linux users find issue in their distro of choice’s user experience and make no effort to send feedback. I’ve fixed bugs like
almost exactly after I saw the post, and ported the fix to the stable release.
Full disclosure, I actually used Manjaro before I was using NixOS.
And while I noticed similar paper cuts upon switching, I understood I switched for something greater than reducing paper cuts.
warmth - 
worldofpeace