[mikewhy]

I just use homebrew on Linux. Things are relatively up to date, there's better support for installing multiple versions of something compared to apt/pacman/what have you, and development tools are separated from system packages.

[emptysongglass]

Homebrew is the lowest common denominator of package managers. If you search Algolia for homebrew you'll find many, many stories of hard times. It seems to be the most popular package manager on macOS but it is dog slow. It is easily the slowest package manager I've ever used.

This is a place where Nix really shines. Known inputs produce known outputs. When you remove a package nothing is left behind. The package selection is immense. I use it on WSL and Arch (with a flake) and it works exactly the same everywhere with no gotchas.

[mikewhy]

Aye, homebrew is pretty slow, but I don't actually interact with it much outside of initial bootstrapping.

Surely you can search for any package manager and find lots of people having issues with it.

I should really check out nix-shell.