The most important features when handwriting IMHO are selection tools and then being able to manipulate the selected strokes.

Write implements a multitude of selection tools such as lasso which most tools have but much more useful to me were ruled selection which selects based on lines on a ruled paper and path selection which selects every stroke you touch with your selection stroke.

You can then move the selected strokes in a ruled manner, so for example I’d select a whole line of strokes and move them down a few lines. This is incredibly useful and brings many of the freedoms we enjoy in editing text on a computer to handwriting.

Re-flowing using stroke divisors is an amazing feature in theory but I’ve never been able to make it work reliably enough for my purposes, so I personally disabled that particular feature.

The undo/redo dial is also pretty neat.

Once you actually try to take real notes or solve some mathematical problems, you’ll really come to appreciate such features and will dread using any note taking application supposedly made for handwritten notes that does not implement such features.

While that’s certainly true, using NixOS usually does not involve many advanced concepts or requires you to understand them.

You can set foo = bar in a .conf file without knowing what a variable is either.

I don’t know about rnote but Xournalpp was very underwhelming when it came to actual handwriting features back when I tried it.

It was an old Fujitsu Q755, not something I’d recommend you buy.

Had a wacom tablet built into the touch screen though which is the only thing I’d watch out for.

Proprietary and closed source.

I always wondered why as they never sold it or had any kind of business model around it.

(nixos more or less requires you understand programming syntax for writing your system config)

It’s technically not a real programming language but an expression language. The difference is that the former is a series of commands to execute in the specified order to produce arbitrary effects while the latter is a declaration of a set of data. You can think of it like writing a config file i.e. in JSON format.

The syntax isn’t really the hard part here. You can learn the basics that comprise 99% of Nix code in a few minutes.
The actually hard part is first figuring out what you even want to do and then second how the NixOS-specific interface for that thing is intended to be used. The former requires general Linux experience and the latter research and problem solving skills.

Because the only way to have a functioning NixOS system is to have it be reproducible. That’s the only way it works; Nix is reproducible by design.

The ability to reproduce a system implies the ability to replicate it.