I am not an Arch-user, but I would say so. At least Nix itself claims that their unstable channel is the largest and most up-to-date package repository currently followed by AUR. So yes, I think you can have best of both worlds - a rock solid base system with the newest software via Nix. It even gets better with Home Manager.

The Mac hardware does limit the choice of distributions a bit. Besides that I can highly recommend Debian 12 as a rock solid base system with Nix as package manager to get latest and greatest software. Actually the nice thing is that you can use Nix package manager on any Linux distribution.

The main reason is that there is no single Linux operating system. Linux basically is just the kernel. Every thing else around this kernel, like tools, applications and libraries, is highly customisable and exists in form of various forms of Linux operating system distributions. The fact that these distributions are very different from each other makes it almost impossible to certify industrial products for „the Linux“ operating system. There are just too many variations of it.

I have been using Firefox ever since. Never really had a reason to switch to something else.

I don’t want to hear how good this game is because I only own a PS5 and don’t have a gaming PC.

Properly just Process Manager with the icon from macOS Activity Monitor.

Creating a snapshot is not the backup itself. It is basically freezing the current state of your files from this point on and then remembering what has chanced compared to the snapshot. So yes, it is normal that this takes no time since nothing is copied on your hard drive. If you want to backup the snapshot you need to make an actual backup of it. This is possible with btrfs. But since I haven’t done it yet, I can’t tell you the exact command.

Only during the night when I am asleep.

Absolutely. wezterm is so good.