[zamalek]

I do use Nix and direnv for my work Ubuntu machine. The glibc issue rings true, it was crashing my file manager for quite a long time (I suspect for thumbnail generation). I learned to become better at cli file management ;).

Apart from glibc, I have never had issues with two sets of binaries vying for superiority. Nix binaries take preference with my "vanilla" setup. I think that might be Devbox doing something strange with $PATH?

[undecisive]

Yeah, it was paper cuts - for example, if you don't have git installed inside your devbox, it wouldn't work because of different glibc versions. Which would be fine, but my shell prompt uses git. So there has to be a nix version of git installed for every project for my machine, despite almost no projects technically needing it.

There were a couple of other libraries, can't remember which ones. I remember once having a fun chain of a library that depended on a library that depended on two libraries that in turn depended on glibc, and for some reason the last link of the chain, only one of the libraries was hitting the system libc incorrectly - that was a fun one to debug. I think I ditched that dependency in the end, it was the only solution (and was clearly badly written).

One of my projects used an older version of ruby. In that case, there was a gem to connect to the database, and that gem links to the db client library, but the db is new and the ruby is old and guess what? Two different versions of glibc, both being used within the nix ecosystem.

I worked around a lot of it with LD_LIBRARY_PATH (I think? from memory) which I had to unset for everything in devbox, and used aliases to set it to a backup of that env whenever I found a binary that needed it - and then they tried to fix that, but it just seemed to stop my workarounds from working, so I had to come up with new ones.

But yeah, it was a wild ride. Most of it came back to glibc or environment variables or both, and probably me doing something I really ought not to do (like support old projects). Alas, for me, it wasn't worth the effort - but I sure learned a lot.