[orangepurple]

You don't need a fancy Nixpkgs setup. GNU Patch works just fine and its 37 years old.

[ruuda]

It works fine for applying the patch, but then you have to manually follow all of the build steps, turn it into a distribution package, etc. With Nix it is easy to edit an upstream package that already knows how to build the software, to include the patch.

[orangepurple]

I have been doing this with the Arch Linux AUR for many years and it works well too