Nix / NixOS

I'd definitely use it (and I do) for deploying remote software and for the use cases you mentioned. Still, we can all agree that, in the context of Nixos, native derivations are superior and almost always preferred. I am currently using a flatpak of zen-browser until the derivations can get added to nixpkgs. But that's just a temporary patch that I will remove soon. I have also seen containers outperform Nix in software that strictly enforces the FHS style and doesn't play nicely in the immutable world.