there are two images for me on .ml as well (I use Eternity client, maybe that matters)

Nix doesn't do anything special when launched.

The way it works is very simple - instead of e.g. /usr/lib/libssl.so.3, binaries use /nix/store/openssl-.../lib/libssl.so.3. This is done at build time, not runtime.

In short, Nix reduces the setup time, both for your system and for your projects. If you find yourself spending a while setting stuff up (for example, after a reinstall; or maybe you want to run your project on another PC and need to install the right dependencies), Nix will help. Otherwise, if your desktop is vanilla Fedora or whatever and you don't do much programming (or you don't have any dependency management problems), Nix probably isn't for you.

sway with tabs (i usually dont use actual tiling)+4-5 workspaces

waybar for status display and on mobile also for menu access

rofi as the app launcher (i also plan to write a proper rofi menu for my phone for quick access to useful commands/config but it's heavily wip)

i patched sway for push to talk because wayland spec doesnt support keybindings in a way required for push to talk for now

i also plan to patch it on the phone to completely forbid fullscreen apps (as they hide the menu which i use for workspace/window switching) and show the window bar on all windows (for example, firefox extension/downloads popups)

NixOS is a general purpose distro (I use it on my router, server and laptop, and plan to install it on my phone, it doesn't get any more general purpose). To run packages that aren't in its repo, you write a package yourself. Note that unlike on traditional Linux systems, there's essentially no concept of "installing" packages. Packages are built and put into /nix/store, then you can optionally add them to your system packages or user packages and they will be symlinked to /run/current-system/sw or ~/.nix-profile, but there's nothing preventing you from just using the package without adding it to system/user packages.

it's fine, but I recommend only enabling autologin at boot so you can lock the screen without shutting down the entire PC

ssh keys go into my keepass db, keepassxc imports them into gpg agent or ssh agent. Bash aliases and so on are in my dotfiles

I recommend Oracle Cloud Always Free - 4 Arm cores, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage. I've used it before they sanctioned Russia and it worked fine (but if hardware fails your data will stay but you will be at the bottom of the queue for replacement)

VS Code is a text editor with plugins, VS is a full blown IDE with many many many features (it's like 10GB+ out of the box)

This would work for something like Ubuntu, but I use NixOS so it's not gonna help much (but the NixOS linux-firmware maintainer does know of the issue)

It's better than Whatsapp & Co since it's FOSS. It's worse than Matrix and XMPP since those are federated (and Matrix has e2ee). It's about tied with Signal, Signal is FOSS but hostile to third-party clients, in exchange it has encryption on by default.

Telegram is known to occasionally hand out users' data in extraordinary circumstances, but that's pretty rare overall. It's not the choice for super sensitive communications, but it's decent as a better alternative for SNS. It's very popular in Russia because it has public one-to-many channels and unlike VK and etc it mostly doesn't censor stuff. I'll never use Whatsapp, I have no reason to use Signal because nobody I know uses it and Matrix is better, Telegram is alright in my book.

Also it's possible to buy anonymous telegram accounts, not sure that's possible for Signal.

it looks like it's similar to SmokeAPI which is used by CreamApi, though SmokeAPI has much more code (I don't really know what for, it seems pretty bloated actually, but some of it is an improvement over my version), and more importantly SmokeAPI isn't crossplatform