I think it's time to give Nix a chance

Summary

The modern developer tooling ecosystem has exploded with choices, leading to frustrating scenarios where some piece of code builds perfectly on someone’s system, runs flawlessly in production, but mysteriously fails to build for you and you have absolutely no idea why. You’re left debugging with no clear direction—perhaps it’s a missing system dependency, a subtly different library version, or some environment variable that exists somewhere in the void, and nowhere else. If this sounds familiar, you too might be experiencing the fundamental problem that Nix was designed to solve: the lack of true reproducibility in software development. Despite being around for about two decades, Nix has largely flown under the radar of mainstream development. Most developers have heard of it in passing—often described as “that functional package manager with a steep learning curve” or “the thing NixOS uses”—dismissing it as academic or overly complex. I believe this perception is getting increasingly outdated, Nix deserves a chance. First, let’s get this out of the way: Nix still does have a steep learning curve. It requires learning a new functional programming language, understanding unfamiliar concepts like derivations and the /nix/store, and rethinking how package management works. The documentation can be dense, scattered, and the error messages are outright unhelpful in some cases. You’re essentially learning an entirely different approach to software deployment and environment management. But here’s the thing—as of this post, the tooling around Nix has matured significantly, and the problems Nix solves have only become more pressing. If you’ve ever lost hours debugging environment differences, juggled multiple version managers, or struggled with reproducible builds, Nix addresses these pain points at the architectural level rather than through workarounds. And I am here to argue that despite the quirks and learning investment, Nix’s benefits are compelling enough to warrant ...