I was in the same boat two years ago.

What I did is that I’ve setup a VM with NixOS in it to play with, learn the language and tweak the configuration file.

The great thing about NixOS is that once I was feeling confident enough to switch I installed NixOS on bare metal, loaded the configuration file I prepared in the VM and I instantly had everything installed and running. (Except for the NVidia drivers, fuck nvidia)

Since then I’ve stayed in nixos and I’m not looking back.