ah I think that’s where I’m at odds with a lot of lemmy NixOS users then 😅, since I am and have always been pretty hesitant to recommend NixOS to anyone in particular. I find the upfront costs of NixOS too big for me to recommend the OS to anyone who wasn’t already looking into it and knows its downsides and upsides.

I do agree however on the fact that using nix is purely beneficial. It doesn’t hurt if you just add a .nix file to your project, since it doesn’t do any harm to an already existing project. It can just install your build tools and then consider itself done, and if you don’t happen to like nix after all, the new installer makes uninstalling easier than ever. There is pretty much no downside to downloading the package manager, something I can’t say about the OS.

Having said that, I don’t think nix should be the end-all be-all standard in package management. I’m sure there will be other package managers that will be better than “nix but with yaml sprinkled in”, and are capable of improving the state of the art. At least, that’s something I hope to happen. For example, I have reservations about using a full-blown programming language for doing my project configuration (see people’s problems with Gradle for why you might not want that). I think a maven-style approach (where you’d have just limited config options, but can expand the package manager’s capabilities by telling it to install certain plugins (in the same config file!)), could be worth looking into, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the look out for a potential better nix alternative