I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns.

I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to new users. Though for those willing to invest time in learning it, nix is extremely useful and highly recommended.

Hey! We've been working at Cachix to address this using https://devenv.sh/.

It's primary targeted to improve DX and on-board users quickly.

DevEnv looks neat, maybe I’ll try it.

I expect my main hurdle will be stuff that isn’t in NicPkgs. Especially for dev stuff, I’m going to want to pull in low-profile GitHub stuff or Python packages. What’s the escape hatch to bring those into the dev environment?

One thing you can do is try the Nix package manager on your Linux or macOS system. -- If it's not in nix, you can just do it the way you did things before.

If you want to try NixOS:

1. Writing a package is only necessary for sharing code.. you can still just have Python, setup a virtual env, & run the program as you would.

2. You could use a tool like Podman or Docker, to run stuff in containers. I've heard stuff like https://github.com/containers/toolbox helps this.

(Among other solutions).