[rgoulter]

Yes and no.

I mean, I think this is absolutely the killer feature of Nix (even above the more accessible asdf, since Nix will also provide native libraries); it's really nice to get a development environment which will Just Work. (OP's frustration isn't unusual).

On the other hand, Nix doesn't make problems disappear; and can require having a deep understanding of what the problem encountered is. OP ran into problems trying to get a project which had worked on (presumably) x86_64 macOS, but didn't work on M1.

[WirelessGigabit]

I don't understand the love for asdf. It doesn't support node versions like let's/gallium. It doesn't support Python venvs. Back to nvm and pyenv-virtualenv for me.