If you’ve gotten that far without help I wouldn’t worry too much.
You’ll run into a variety of sharp edges here and there, but if you’re familiar with using Linux in general and have thick skin when it comes to having to debug things that you normally expect to just work™ I don’t think NixOS is actually hard. The documentation and UX aren’t perfect, but there is an actual functional distro that is very usable behind the initial stumbling stones.
If you run into problems, ask and search on this discourse, someone can usually help, and it doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything exotic.
Just be patient and actually give the distro a chance, it’s great once you’re comfortable with it 
This is my shortlist for beginner traps:
- Be careful with user vs system channels. They’re completely independent, so if you install the same software from both you can end up with one hiding the other, and ultimately you’ll run into unexpected version mismatches.
- This is especially true when combined with the hot mess that is
nix-env. Sadly it’s how most people first use the distro, because it feels more like the familiaraptand therefore is kind of the path of least resistence… - Anything that doesn’t come directly from the nix package manager is difficult to get to run, because of how NixOS works (there is no
/lib, so everything from the linker to libc does not exist). You can trysteam-runfor binaries, but if you’re used to installing things withnpm,pip, etc. you will need to find a new strategy for doing that.
Those three together IME piss off some new users enough that they storm off calling us insane.