[__MatrixMan__]

I think that's a valid concern. You read the nix pills and think you know what you're doing and then it turns out that the community has wrapped the things you've learned about in things you've never heard of, so you still can't learn from other people's repos.

[sbt567]

This. I've been actively trying nix-based tooling on and off for my projects because it is legitimately solve the problem around sandboxing, versioning, reproducibility, consistency, etc. Recently, I'm trying to use asdf (and its faster alternative, rtx) and I keep telling myself "huh, nix could solve this problem better". But, damn it is infuriating to learn. Like other commenter said, it is the escape hatch that I'm missing so much. I really really want to convince myself to learn nix The Right Way. But, it feels like you will have another learning curve when using a nix-wrapper tooling.

I still have a high hope for the future of nix. And I believe the time nix will rise in popularity is when they have sorted the UX-related issues.

[__MatrixMan__]

One thing that has helped somewhat is being more thorough in my exploration of repo's that are doing things that are similar to what I'm trying to do.

I want to use nix with a nim project, so I wrote a script that walks through all of the repo's in nimble (nim's package manager) and then filtered those for ones that had a flake.nix in the repo root.

Going through them was a helpful dose of context. It's like you gotta approach it from theory to practice and from practice to theory and eventually your efforts will meet in the middle. I think. I have glimmers of meeting in the middle happening.