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I'm confused by this statement. `nixpkgs` contains tens of thousands of packages, the majority of which have binary substitutions via the NixOS Hydra build farm. Usually the only time I build things from source on my NixOS laptop are when I override some package to use a patch of my own design. Hell, when I was using Arch Linux I found myself building things from source _way_ more often than after switching to NixOS.

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I use void-linux and the only thing that i am building from source(aside from language specific pkgs) are emacs-git and st(terminal emulator).

At that time, most packages were old version on nixpkgs and some weren't available. I will look into it again, when i have the mood to switch distros.

I don’t know when you were last looking but for as long as I’ve been using nix (since early 2015) nixpkgs has had definitions of the vast majority of commonly used software, and pre-built binaries of most of those. Definitely worth another look. Also note that you don’t have to switch distros as nix can be plugged into almost any Linux environment without conflicting with whatever else is there.

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