Linux

I'm probably just too dumb for Nix/NixOS

Probably just didn't want to put in the time/effort. From what I've heard, NixOS takes a lot more time/effort than other distros. Not everybody wants that.

At least you were intellectually honest about NixOS rather than blaming them.

I swear by it but had a year or two where I was struggling. Particularly with languages like Python, it can be tough to train yourself in the Nix way (or to wrap compilation and dependency management into the nix paradigm in this case). With languages like Haskell though, the Nix way goes hand-in-hand with it.

I’ve found Zig to work well with Nix. And there are ways to use Nix REALLY elegantly with Python

Here’s an example of how you’d provision a super simple nix flake dev environment in x86_64 Linux for undetected web scraping with Python

# save this as flake.nix then run nix develop in the root of the repo

{
  description = "Web Scraper";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs?ref=nixpkgs-unstable";
    utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, utils }: utils.lib.eachSystem ["x86_64-linux"] (system: let
    pkgs = import nixpkgs { system = system; };
  in rec {
    packages = {
      pythonEnv =
        pkgs.python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ webdriver-manager openpyxl pandas requests beautifulsoup4 websocket-client selenium keyboard ]);
    };

    devShell = pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        pkgs.chromium
        pkgs.undetected-chromedriver
        packages.pythonEnv
      ];

      shellHook = ''
        export PATH=${pkgs.chromium}/bin:${pkgs.undetected-chromedriver}/bin:$PATH
      '';
    };
  });
}