The ability to start a shell with all the right dependencies configured, without requiring root access or permanently installing new dependencies, seems like something useful.
You can also do that with rootless containers via Podman. There’s even a convenient wrapper for that workflow made by Red Hat called Toolbox (https://github.com/containers/toolbox)
unless you need specific versions of dependencies? The last time I looked to try and port any of our own software the nix answer to needing specific versions dependencies seemed to be "you are holding it wrong".
With Nix flakes it's even easier and you can just mix and match inputs as you want. For example if you want to replace libfoo with your own fork you just do something like:
And the best part is that none of this requires any changes to your system. If you need multiple different specific versions at once, Nix can just do it, as every software is sitting around in /nix/store/{HASH} and there is no risk of anything colliding.
