[DancerOfFaran]

Nix Flakes are stable enough to replace nix-shell and lets you pin versions, so it has a significant reliability advantage.

Things get a bit tricker when flakes are paired with home-manager and especially nix-darwin, as the error handling leaves a lot to be desired (opaque errors that are extremely difficult to debug, leaving you with few choices outside of nuking all nix and re-starting).

[striking]

I've been really careful to avoid OS-wide environment management with Nix, as we're on macOS; the only thing I do is `nix-env install direnv` imperatively during our setup script so we can sidestep the need for `nix-shell`.

[okkdev]

I'm using nix with home-manager on macOS and I'm very satisfied. Haven't touched flakes yet tho.