This is pretty interesting as the first general-purpose package manager outside of the functional package management paradigm to directly complete with Nix in t

This is pretty interesting as the first general-purpose package manager outside of the functional package management paradigm to directly complete with Nix in terms of features like ephemeral shell environments and magic shebangs. At a glance, it's not a reimplementation of Nix with a porcelain. It makes no attempt at Nix-like hermeticity; installation of tea itself fails on NixOS with a dynamic linking error. But it also has the strengths one would expect from the creator of Homebrew taking a second stab at general-purpose package management: the documentation and CLI are charming (if incomplete), it's much faster than Homebrew, and it adds capabilities that Homebrew lacks and which are rare outside of the Nix world. As a Nix person, I'm definitely interested to see what tea can achieve and what kind of userbase it ends up attracting. The less strict approach, day-one emphasis on UX, and choice of a 'dumb', commonplace configuration DSL (YAML) for package definitions could certainly incline a lot of people who shy away from Nix to give it a try. I wonder how binary caching and relocatability are solved, given the apparent per-user prefixes in the homedirs. Nix is really blowing up right now, and still has a huge head start in the breadth and usefulness of Nixpkgs. But a competitor like this really vindicates the recent turn towards emphasizing UX and documentation. If Nix developers to get the new CLI and the flakes schema formally released soon, I think we'll be come out ahead even of 'next-gen' efforts from outside the paradigm, like tea. If they don't, it'll be a missed opportunity for our community.