sure, done

anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

It is likely that you were using the current 'stable' channel that does not have the very latest packages. The 'unstable' channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.

Putting aside the speed uv has a bunch of features that usually require 2-4 separate tools. These tools are very popular but not very well liked. The fact these tools are so popular proves that pip is not sufficient for many use cases. Other languages have a single tool (e.g. cargo) that are very well liked.

Sure, but in the case where you upgrade python and it affects python packages it would affect global packages and a venv in the same way.

upgrading your base image won’t affect your python packages

Surely if upgrading python will affect your global python packages it will also affect your venv python packages?

you can use multi stage builds to create drastically smaller final images

This can also be done without using venv's, you just need to copy them to the location where global packages are installed.

He is a front end dev/engineer and he mainly talks about the UI (which is his expertise).

I don't think they have anything to do with each other, it looks like prefix.dev uses conda packages.

Nice, I hadn't heard of that before, will check it out!

I just see it as less practical than maintaining a toolchain for devs to use.

There are definately some things preventing Nix adoption. What are the reasons you see it as less practical than the alternatives?

What are alternative ways of maintaining a toolchain that achieves the same thing?

OK great, thank you;

Thanks for the list. I don't want to go through the effort of installing from github so am just trying the web apps for now.

Wefwef is really good so far!

So how useful it is in practice?

It's useful for quite a few things in practise:

• You can be sure software that is packaged with nix will behave the same on different computers.
• You can avoid dependency conflicts.
• You can automate some things that would otherwise take multiple (mostly manual steps) on other systems.

This video shows off some of the cool things you can do with nix: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Le0IbPRzOE&feature=share9

How do updates work?

You update a programming by specifying the latest version of a program in config and rebuilding.

You update the OS by pointing to the channel you want to use and rebuilding.

You can time travel back to a previous state if anything goes wrong.

Can it play Crysis?

I expect so, some people.do use nix for gaming.