[lemonwaterlime]

It is possible to use nix simply as a better Homebrew—one where you can update packages without all of your system potentially breaking from package updates. That has happened to many people with brew and it no longer happens to me.

That means `nix-env -iA <packagename>`.

Is this approach using the full power of nix? No. But in a “worse-is-better” kind of way, just doing this has given me a more stable system than I had with Homebrew. And that’s all I wanted from nix. Flakes and nix-shell are just additional things that I’ve gotten some benefit from over time.