[Cloudef]

With NixOS, you typically use flake.nix or shell.nix to "shell into" development environment so this is kinda non issue. You can also use `nix run` or `nix-env` to mix traditional package management and this.

> but it's going to be a lot of effort trying to figure out where all your tools are dumping their state.

This is true though, if you dont want to manage all of their configs from nix, I would make their dump locations, or $XDG_DIRS/$HOME (if you are lazy) permanent in this case.