Its pretty easy to convert any distro to NixOS. This however is not a ship of theseus process.
TBH Ubuntu Gnome would probably also run alright, but ram increase would definitely be advised for coding. Some language servers and compilers can really eat ram almost like Google Chrome (supposedly i never used it).
helix ftw 🧬
there is also https://forge.hackers.town/hackers.town/nepenthes
found this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12257968/how-to-forward-local-keypair-in-a-ssh-session