I wouldn’t specifically say nixOS is stable in the same sense debian is but yes, it can totally handle this use case. I mainly run k8s on it, but a few home machines run docker (or, rather, podman) containers.

A thing about nixOS is that quite often you won’t need containers at all and would be better off without them, managing your apps as part of the system state as a whole. I only do that because I can’t be bothered to properly switch to nixOS services for ELK (which is supported by nixOS).

It's a very stable solution in general and usually ends with a configuration that either doesn’t apply at all or applies with no issues. Gitops included for pretty much free. It requires understanding nix, and it can be tricky, but not overly tricky.

All and all I haven’t had an Ubuntu in homelab for two years now and can’t be happier about that.

Still a few Ubuntu Server stragglers here and there, but it works quite well as long as you keep your base config fairly lean and push the complexity into the containers.

Documentation tends to be either good or nonexistent depending on what you're doing, so for anything beyond standard configuration but it can usually be pieced together from ArchWiki and the systemd docs.

All in all, powerful and repeatable (and a lot less tedious than Ansible, etc), but perhaps not super beginner-friendly once you start getting into the weeds. Ubuntu Server is just better documented and supported if you need something super quick and easy.

Works well for me. Quick to set up as well if you are already familiar for nixos