I am currently evaluating Nix as a replacement for Homebrew CLI apps in macOS1. Others have previously written about this.
My goal is to keep a sane learning curve and learn things on-the-fly, only as needed. Nix is a massive ecosystem and has so many batteries included and components (NixOS, NixPkgs, NixOps, Nix programming language, nix-shell, nix-env, nix-darwin, home-manager, …). The good news is that those components are for the most part modular, there’s no need to adopt them all in order to reap the benefits that Nix provides.
For now, I am only adopting nix-env and nix-shell, with no *.nix config files. This post covers nix-env.
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