Most people on the Nix world are moving away from stateful package management entirely, identifying it as precisely what causes complexity and mixed up & stale

Most people on the Nix world are moving away from stateful package management entirely, identifying it as precisely what causes complexity and mixed up & stale dependencies in the first place. It's much simpler to be able to either just name what you need when you're about to use it or put together a list of packages for an environment you're going to repeatedly use. The comparison in this case would be nix-shell -p qemu Which is gone and not junking up your system as soon as you've finished with the shell provided.