I've worked in multiple nix-heavy environments, and I've come to really dislike it, despite thinking that Dolstra's thesis and core ideas are an important development in the space of package management. Everywhere it shows up it infects projects, creates constant breakage, and requires at least 1 person to become a nix expert, memorizing a bunch of esoteric nonsense. Basically it forces all of the adhoc nonsense of unix systems to be right in your face constantly, and leads to perpetual dependency limbo.

It really depends on the person, for me I have my own setup script that works on both Mac and Linux, installing all of my core software using whichever method is best for each system, I basically have a csv with columns of “program” “install command Linux” and “install command Mac” and it just works.

Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.

All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install

I promise you that it will be worth it. Try again.