Falling in Love with Nix

Nix is phenomenal. Nix makes hard things so easy that I'm astounded anyone is doing it any other way. There are whole classes of problems that you just can't encounter on Nix. I first dipped my toe in the water 4 months ago and it's been bliss. Nix and NixOS have lots of different tendrils that impact different kinds of work. Here are the problems that they have solved for me. Roses Per Project Dependency Mangement Each software project relies on slightly different environments. My site builder might need Node 24, my fork of an open source project needs Node 20, my work frontend might need Node 22. And maybe theres some program I like that only distributes through npm, so I need a global npm install. For Node.js, the tool generally reached for is nvm which allows you to install parallel Node versions. I don't know how that interacts with a global npm, and thinking about that stresses me out -- but fair enough, let's use nvm. Problem solved. Now repeat the same problem on the same…