The book John Dies at the End has a line I’m going to have to paraphrase that says something to the effect of “cruelty is the purest display of power”, and it makes sense. You do something you know they don’t like, but for whatever reason, they’re forced to take it. Not fighting back is an implicit agreement that the cruel one has more power.
I installed NixOS a couple months ago, and it’s been my smoothest Linux experience to date. Everything just worked, except I had to figure out how to open the firewall for my network drive on my home server to be discoverable and usable. But that was fairly expected. I game, so I stress test the graphics routinely. No WiFi, though, so I guess that could maybe be flaky.