I've had a rather similar experience with NicOS a few years ago. I did get comfortable with the language and even contributed a small package! I did like having a reproducible config file for my whole OS setup.
However, everything was just a hassle to get working. Any program that's not in the package repos takes a day or two of fiddling to install. I just lost patience with it and have been on Ubuntu for the past few years.
The common advice is just using the steam-run wrapper. It will run the binary in an ubuntu-esque fhs environment, which is what must binaries you get expect. Worked every time for me.
Granted, it's not ideal that this kind of hint is needed for such an important workflow. Oh well. All the rest still makes it easily worth it for me.
Ahh that's right, I remember using the steam-run wrapper a lot.
If I remember correctly, it would work in 80% of cases and fail on the last 20% (usually if some library is missing or if it has some strange binary installation procedure).
The 20% made it not worth it for me to use as a desktop environment. I still see the value in it for server configurations, though.
However, everything was just a hassle to get working. Any program that's not in the package repos takes a day or two of fiddling to install. I just lost patience with it and have been on Ubuntu for the past few years.