I think the main pain point of distro hopping is learning a new package manager, I discovered Nix a while ago, it works on every single OS, has the biggest package repo out there. I replaced Homebrew on my mac with it. If this piques your interest, give it a go. Later, you can integrate with Home-manager to manage all of your program config to have a reproducible dev environment on any machine, as described in the tutorial here.
The catch is it’s really advanced and got steep learning curve. You can adopt gradually tho. Just get started with nix-shell and nix-env
I love Nix even if the learning curve is STEEP.
Like you, I’ve replaced Homebrew with nix and home-manager.
I’ve also had a bit of fun spinning up full desktop environments with NixOS inside virtual machines and though it took far longer than I thought to get it going to start with, I’ve now got a good foundation and am super happy with it.
I’m working up to trying out nix-darwin. Think I’ll start out with a MacOS VM first just in case I butcher it.
I would love to roll out my
nix-darwintoo, but I’m on a crappy 256gb macbook and xcode + android studio took most of it. Guess I have to experiment on the real desktop rather than macOS VM