[dblooman]

Last year while working in a nix using team, Golang was lagging behind on nix by a few months, I wanted to use a new feature from the latest version and it lead to some awkward conversations. Nix is not a drop in replacement for homebrew, nor is it fast when it comes to community updates. If you have a small number of packages it works well, but if you only use a few number of packages, why do you need a heavy package manager.

[dnr]

I'm also using NixOS and working on Go projects, and had to deal with out-of-date Go releases. Nixpkgs generally does get the latest Go versions pretty quickly, but only in the unstable channels, they're not backported to NixOS releases. You can just grab that one package out of nixpkgs-unstable or nixos-unstable, like:

    (import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixpkgs-unstable.tar.gz") {}).go_1_21

where you had `pkgs.go` before (in your shell.nix or wherever).

[matrss]

> Nix is not a drop in replacement for homebrew, nor is it fast when it comes to community updates.

I am certain there are some exceptions and edge cases to this, but in my experience nixpkgs is the largest and most up-to-date repository of all, by a wide margin. Did you use nixpkgs-unstable or a stable release?

[Cu3PO42]

While I am a happy user of Nix and think that the unstable channel is generally recent enough, I have not quite found it to be the "most up-to-date". Among the package repositories I have used, that honor probably goes to openSUSE Tumbleweed.