> ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs

> ll stick with "difficult" package managers that seem to resolve things simply rather than having 27 different copies of the same thing That's not how Nixpkgs works. Nixpkgs, the collection of packages that NixOS is built on top of, is a monorepo with only one version of each end user package. There are only multiple versions of a package in a given commit of Nixpkgs if that is necessary to support some other important tuple of packages because they each have a hard dependency on different versions of some package— just like on your typical Linux distro. The ability to have multiple versions of something installed side-by-side comes into play for your own voluntary customizations, and (optionally) for some third-party package sources. Nix doesn't feature other NPM insanity either— there's no network access at bulld time, no circular dependencies, etc.