You have similar but yet different problems on other distros, too. For example if you want to use a very old node version then you either find a prerecompilati

You have similar but yet different problems on other distros, too. For example if you want to use a very old node version then you either find a prerecompilation for your distro or also compile it yourself. The precompilation might be linked against an older glibc version or compiling does not work with your distros because your icu version is incompatible and then you are in the same rabbit hole. volta "just works" because it was specifically designed to achieve one defined purpose run on a few platforms and is well tested on those. nix is general and cannot achieve everything. Somewhere maintainers need to cut a line otherwise things get completely out of hand. Network is restricted in the sandbox because otherwise reproducibility would be severely reduced and we could not guarantee that the outputs match what we expect them to be. Also downloaded binaries would usually need patching anyway. Also you are not supposed to take everything from nixpkgs. Like on any other distro if you are developing something the ecosystems own tools are the most well equipped and have all the versions. The versions in nixpkgs are the versions we need for other packages and NixOS, not every possible version you could need to develop a project with specific requirements necessarily. PS: volta did not just work on my NixOS machine because it assumes that relative to glibc there will be a lib directory where it can place things.