In the near term it makes more sense to position nix as a common interface between app developers and distro maintainers and not as a direct-to-user way to cut

In the near term it makes more sense to position nix as a common interface between app developers and distro maintainers and not as a direct-to-user way to cut their distro maintainers out of the loop entirely (although it is quite useful for that). Ideally, a distro maintainer would come across a project packaged with nix and think: > Oh good, the app dev has taken extra steps to make life easy for me. As-is, I don't think that's the case. You can add a flake output to your project which builds an .rpm or a .deb file, but it's not commonly done. I'm guessing that most of the time, distro maintainers would instead hook directly into a language specific build-tool like cmake or cargo and ignore the nix stuff. They benefit from nix only indirectly in cases where it has prevented the app dev from doing crazy things in their build (or at least has made that crazyness explicit, versus some kind of works-on-my-machine accident or some kind of nothing-to-see here skulduggery). If we want to nixify the world I think we should focus less on talking people out of using package managers which they like and more on making the underlying packages more uniform.