Nix in general seems promising for both reproducible software and as a distro. But making a full switch seems like a lot of work and im lazy. Because of this I am happy to find out that the home-manager project works on non-nix distros. Tl:dr on home-manager: it lets you configure and install software on your system using the nix ecosystem. This lets me incrementally switch while staying on my regular distros. I have successfully run the home-manager on Ubuntu and Arch linux.
All I needed was nix installed and the installation of home-manager.
Note on the home-manager install: The $PATH variable only needed to be set for the installation. I did not need to set it in .bashrc.
The whole nix language(?) is still daunting but so far I managed to build up piece by piece my configuration. The Appendix A is a great resource and everything else I managed to look up so far. One thing I haven’t tackled yet is configuring neovim. That seems a bit more involved but im sure it will work out. For progress on that you can check out my nixpkgs config.
Disclaimer: This is something I just learned so I might be completely wrong. If I am please let me know, my email is in the footer.