[leoh]

flox is the best thing I know of for articulating binary dependencies (language runtimes, etc.), which is probably the sweet spot for nix anyways at the moment (i.e. as opposed to trying to build everything "With the One [Tool] to [Replace] Them All"). flox uses nix for its backend, but has a simple TOML syntax and is properly humble about what it can do -- but killer at it -- as opposed to promising the world.

https://flox.dev

[mmgutz]

There's also [devbox](https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox).

Tried a lot of them, and after a while I found the nix the package manager on non NixOS requires too many workarounds. Things don't just work. For example, installing alacritty requires an OpenGL wrapper. Neovim can't find libraries to build some plugins. Basically, anything GUI had issues.

In the end, `cargo install`, `go install` and download a release archive from github are simpler to script for most of the tools I use.

[andrewla]

This has been a consistent problem for me as well; Nix is way too concerned about purity. I think it comes from a desire to make package installation fast by using prebuilt binaries. I personally could give or take the prebuilt binary concept; nice to have but I'm willing to pay the time cost to be able to run things on non-NixOS systems.