Nix is a distro that admits defeat against dependency management and entirely gives up on the idea of having system libraries. Instead every application you want to run has to have all of it's dependencies explicitly stated and provided custom in nix style configs for each program. Usually this means someone else has done all this packaging work for you. They hate it when people call it containerization but it's effectively taking containerization to the extreme for every single bit of software on your system with no ability to not use containers.

But if, say, you want to compile a random C program you found on the web then it is up to your to now set up the build environment and provide all the libraries and deps to be able to compile and then run the program. Just running make or ./configure or cmake . isn't going to do it because those configuration setups won't have a system lib environment to check against. It seems like a really weird distro to chose as your desktop but makes fine sense in commercial enterprises we're you're going to re-build the world for all your software anyway.