I’d suggest going through the logs and seeing if anything seems amiss. On a fresh boot, run the following:

journalctl --boot

btrfs + snapper can easily achieve the same thing. You can checkout OpenSUSE.

I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.

I installed and used ModelSim and Intel Quartus for a couple of hardware courses that I had.

I suggest trying out Bottles. You can easily install it with one command through flatpak. I’ve had luck running a lot of windows only software used in hardware engineering.

I’ve been using system76-scheduler for a while now and it works great. You can create a profile for your desired software and all of its related processes and then assign a high priority (low niceness) to them.

I would just buy a cheap RAM stick and install one of the mainstream distrobutions with KDE Plasma on it. You can turn off most of the desktop effects and unnecessary background services.

You can help improve the desktop integration documentation at their GitHub repo.

Fish and its search functionality work great for me.