Go with Ansible unless you want to fully dedicate into Nix ecosystem and spend a lot of time learning it (and it's not easy, for example because of lacking documentation). Also Ansible is something you more often find in actual projects/workplace.

well, yes true, but ansible sucks and especially for small and chaotic projects where people just change things on the machines without reflecting it in ansible it is a nightmare

You can hardly blame the tool for that, it's your process that's flawed.

Why would anyone change anything on the machine if the machine is managed by Ansible?

If you're planning on using Ansible for your job or to administer Linux systems, then stick with Ansible. Nix is very niche and you aren't going to see much return on investment until adoption is significantly higher, and I'm not sure that will happen in its current state.

That being said if you want to learn Nix for its own sake or because it is awesome, which it is, then have fun!

Nix is gonna save your sanity in the long run however, compared to the ansible mess you eventually end up with.

Hard disagree. In the context of a team, just about any mainstream tool will be more manageable in the long run. There aren't that many people willing to grok Nix and its massive learning curve.

If you can adopt NixOS, then it's worth considering. But if you have to use a standard distro then Nix on its own won't solve your configuration-management problems.

To sum it up succinctly, I would say that Nix helps you manage $PATH while NixOS helps you manage /etc.

Try it out in a VM and see for yourself.

I got into Ansible around 8 months ago and wrote up a blog post with detailed steps, and a companion repository, about how to get started with using it. The blog post goes into how to setup everything needed for Android development via Ansible.

Perhaps, if you decide to take a look at Ansible, it might help with getting started https://hth.is/2023/01/02/android-ansible/

If you have OSX, it's much more reliable and better option than homebrew, so there it would pay off immediately

Just for your consideration, the network effect is very real with package managers, too:

https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.05&show=awscli2 is 2.11.27 (even on the "unstable" channel), versus https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/awscli#default that is 2.12.1, which correctly is the most current (https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/tags)

This is incorrect. Nixpkgs updated to 2.12 on the same day as Homebrew.

- Nixpkgs (3 days ago): https://nixpk.gs/pr-tracker.html?pr=238031

- Homebrew (3 days ago): https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/133968

Your link refers to the 23.05 stable release channel, so it'd likely stay at 2.11. Package updates don't get backported to stable channels except for fixes. Additionally, the package search page probably isn't updated in real time so the version might be slightly out of sync.

Nixpkgs is generally quick to update packages because Nix encourages automation.