When it’s hard to do something in Nix, it’s really hard. Let’s say you download a random binary which isn’t part of the Nix distribution — it is unlikely that

When it’s hard to do something in Nix, it’s really hard. Let’s say you download a random binary which isn’t part of the Nix distribution — it is unlikely that you can run the binary; you may need to run ldd or nm to check the headers or construct the LD_LIBRARY_PATH manually. So many random build scripts assume certain things like cp exists in /bin/cp or use absolute paths (looking at you Python) that I tend to find I’m yak-shaving pretty often. The documentation for Nix… is special. I’ve never seen any configuration need to explain the fixed-point [1] in order to do something which should be pretty simple. On the other hand, when it works, it works brilliantly. I have projects where I want to fetch some random URL, or build some randomly generated C file; previously which I would have just said sod-it and checked it into the repository. Being able to share crafted environments ala direnv to colleagues and the continuous-integration is magical. Having per-project environment management which doesn’t require 3-4 tools like virtualenv, nvm, docker, docker-compose is really nice. [1] https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packages.html https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...