I'm confused by this statement. `nixpkgs` contains tens of thousands of packages, the majority of which have binary substitutions via the NixOS Hydra build farm. Usually the only time I build things from source on my NixOS laptop are when I override some package to use a patch of my own design. Hell, when I was using Arch Linux I found myself building things from source _way_ more often than after switching to NixOS.
I use void-linux and the only thing that i am building from source(aside from language specific pkgs) are emacs-git and st(terminal emulator).
At that time, most packages were old version on nixpkgs and some weren't available. I will look into it again, when i have the mood to switch distros.
Re:What is Nix and why you should try it
by thinkpad20 on Monday October 16, 2017 @12:35AM
(#15480837)
I don’t know when you were last looking but for as long as I’ve been using nix (since early 2015) nixpkgs has had definitions of the vast majority of commonly used software, and pre-built binaries of most of those. Definitely worth another look. Also note that you don’t have to switch distros as nix can be plugged into almost any Linux environment without conflicting with whatever else is there.
I used Arch Linux for a while (~3 years) before making the jump to NixOS.
Many things I got from AUR packages are binary-cached in stable Nixpkgs, not to mention "compilers" (GCC, clang, and various versions of GHC in my case). I don't know when you last tried it out, but binary availability isn't a problem now if you'd like to give NixOS a spin. The only thing I build from source is polybar[0].
Re:What is Nix and why you should try it
by thomastjeffery on Sunday October 15, 2017 @09:29PM
(#15480311)
I very rarely run into packages that Nix doesn't have prebuilt binaries for.
But the package manager itself might be a good idea for dev environments, but all the languages i use provide similar facility(not counting system-library dependencies).