It’s actually easier this way because you keep everything in one place.

I edited some file on Ubuntu to merge my audio channels into one because one of my speakers broke. Do you think I know what change I made to what file now? When I update, do you think I can merge my changes with the new file and make everything work? Of course not, I am several years into forgetting what I did

But configuration.nix is one file, I usually get a deprecation notice for some stuff and just change a line here and there from time to time. All of my changes are in there and they are in git. When I switched to flakes I also added flake.nix in there, but it’s still just two files in one folder I play around with. Not only that, but the maintainers already gave me the options I need for my services. I don’t have to follow some guide online to set something up, I just enable it and it works immediately.

For example, enabling iwd is:

networking.wireless.iwd.enable = true;

I just did that and it worked. I commented it out and it went back to whatever the default package is. Is this as easy to toggle back and forth in other distros?

Using Scheme instead of a purely functional language like Nix as the Nix/Guix expression language is a bold choice I am not sure I agree with.

Scheme is the most functional of all non-purely-functional languages that I know of. What’s more, the parts of Guix in which packages are defined are quite pure, even using monads for some things, so it is really not too different from the Nix language.