Yes, for what it's worth I don't mean to diminish your experience. Nix definitely requires pouring a lot of time to get to a working state, is very under-docume

Yes, for what it's worth I don't mean to diminish your experience. Nix definitely requires pouring a lot of time to get to a working state, is very under-documented, has terrible error messages, will cause errors that don't exist elsewhere, and has no clear "best practice" guide on how to use it. Those are all super annoying pain-points and I do hope they'll get better over time. At the end of the day, it's a bit of a balancing act. For me, the up-front work of getting a nix build up was definitely worth it, as it allowed my collaborators to get up to speed on complex projects with complex build systems quickly, and gave me a very simple way to reproduce old binaries when I need to bissect bugs. But it definitely took a huge up-front investment. If all you're after is a way to pin your toolchains, I echo the recommendation of asdf made in a sibling comment. I use it on simpler projects where I just need to pin a language version (and let the language tooling pin the rest of the dependency tree - package.lock-style). It will often be enough, and is much easier to get started with! The only thing that won't pin will be system dependencies (like openssl and such), but that is often an acceptable tradeoff.