| > when I have to use ruby 2.2 and nix cannot do it Considering that ruby 2.2 was released in 2014, I can't say I'm surprised. It's too much effort to continue maintaining something so old. But if you really want to use it, you could try using the package definition from an older commit of Nixpkgs: let
nixpkgs1709 = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
owner = "NixOS";
repo = "nixpkgs";
rev = "e09c0adc63d10249dac8f90313f91e1050861d3c";
sha256 = "sha256-Di9D0gvaESV3JmX/kW2uEJ68QDlAke23t19bImTXsJ8=";
};
pinnedPkgs = import nixpkgs1709 { };
in
pinnedPkgs.ruby_2_2
> Another extremely frustrating experience was the bifurcation between nix and nixos.I'm not sure what you mean. Nix is the package manager while NixOS is an entire distro based on Nix the package manager and its configuration language. They have clear separation of concerns. Keeping it that way has actual benefits too, namely portability. It allows you to use Nix on a wide range of platforms including non-NixOS Linux distros, macOS, and even BSDs to some extent. > On top of nixos/nix, there's also shell.nix/flakes. Flakes are currently an experimental feature and not meant for wide use yet. So if you're just getting started with Nix, I'd recommend looking into it later until you're sufficiently comfortable with Nix. They're not fundamentally different, though. Flakes formalize the conventions for writing Nix expressions to make them more reusable. |