What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
NixOS is super easy. It gets a bit complicated when you use flakes, but you don’t need to to start.
You just put the system packages into the configuration so you can replicate that system everywhere.
But if you don’t care, just install everything to the user profile! It just works like any distro then, no config files to mess with
The first power spike you will experience is actually setting up a service like Jellyfin by just editing the configuration.nix, though. It’s so much easier than having to mess with the configuration yourself (someone already did the work for you)