Flox is the best thing I know of for articulating binary dependencies (language runtimes, etc.), which is probably the sweet spot for nix anyways at the moment. Flox uses nix for its backend, but has a simple TOML syntax and is properly humble about what it can do -- but killer at it -- as opposed to promising the world. https://flox.dev. - Source: Hacker News / 13 days ago

Nix and NixOS are in something like the state git was in before GitHub: the fundamental idea is based on more serious computer science than the status quo (SVN, Docker), the plumbing still has some issues but isn’t worse, and the porcelain and docs are just not there for mainstream adoption. I think that might have changed with the release of flox: https://flox.dev, it’s basically seamless (and that’s not... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

Background for this quest: I have a personal project idea where I need to build a set of tools that's used in web development and general programming. But then I felt if I need to implement things differently providing the ability for others to develop tools on their own which could be pluggable. This is an electron-based application that will be similar to https://utilso.com/ and https://devutils.app/. Source: over 2 years ago