Comment by lilyball

I'm running NixOS on a raspberry pi and I deploy to it with deploy-rs¹. This works pretty well for me. My dev machine is an Apple Silicon laptop with nix-darwin installed and I use its nix.linux-builder module to run an aarch64-linux VM as a remote builder to build the rpi's system. All this means the rpi never has to do any building itself, and doesn't even need the nixpkgs source installed either.

If you want to do this yourself, I recommend using https://github.com/nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix so the system is configured much more closely to how the stock raspberry pi image works. The benefit of this is better reliability of stuff like bluetooth.

¹https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs