I don’t think it’s an apt comparison of the distros, but I agree that both have a cult-like following. I also feel like there’s a bit of a difference in the evangelism of both distros… I don’t really understand why people evangelize Arch, and my impression is largely that (1) people mention that they’re on Arch so others know they might be having different configuration issues, or less charitably (2) people mention Arch as a weird brag because it’s seen as an “advanced” distro. In contrast people seem to recommend nix and NixOS because it solves a frankly ridiculous amount of real problems that people experience with development environments, package managers, and system management. I.e., we bring up nix and NixOS because we care about you and think it might actually be useful for you. I don’t really want to dictate what other people use or brag about using nix / NixOS, but people complain to me about different problems constantly that are just resolved by nix, so it feels wrong not to mention it. It’s frustrating because it definitely makes you seem like you’re in a cult, but it really is the right level of abstraction for package management, and as a result it solves so many problems and little frustrations.
Honestly, it’s kind of frustrating to watch people not use nix. I have nix set up for the projects at work because I got tired of them not building and people randomly changing dependencies and it taking 3-4 weeks for somebody new to the project to get the thing to compile. Everybody new that I have set up with nix gets the project working instantly, and everybody else ends up spending weeks flailing around with installation. Unfortunately, I’ve given up on recommending people use nix for the project because a number of senior people have decided that they don’t like nix and there’s a bizarre amount of drama whenever I recommend a newbie just use it to get set up (even though it has always worked out better for them). It’s just not worth the headache for me to stick my neck out, but I feel bad and it’s really frustrating how literally everybody else takes 3-4 weeks to get up and running without nix :|.