Even for things like trying out a new shell you can temporarily move the dotfiles somewhere and restore them back and it still takes less time than converting everything to Nix.
If you just want a throwaway VM, it's straightforward to create one through the UI cloud console. Whereas, terraform is nevertheless still a useful tool to use to manage VMs.
For stuff like installing development dependencies.. it's maybe not difficult to copy-and-paste instructions from a readme, but solutions like devcontainers or Nix's development shells can be useful even if costing more overhead.
My biggest complaint is what I mentioned above: it’s trying to be everything for package management, and adds a lot of complexity (and I disagree that it’s always necessary/inherent) compared to just installing a tool and sometimes upgrading it. That complexity often means I have to debug it rather than the tool that I want to - I might have to debug Nix instead of Node, which is not always straightforward. In my limited experience Nix got in my way more than I’d like, and in ways I didn’t expect or want to deal with, and until it’s as seamless as something like Homebrew or apt, it’ll be a hard sell.
A simple UNIX script or PowerShell utility takes care of it.
None of the ones I have used during the last decades has ever grown to more than like 20 lines of code, minus comments.
I think the closest mainstream UX for "you can try out this program without having to install it" is running a Docker image.
:) I'd say Nix is second best at everything related to packages.
One thing I haven't tried yet is building a container from a flake, which would have obvious benefits for reproducibility. Still don't think it would help with service orchestration though.
