I did try to use nix, the package manager, twice over these years too, but it never survived enough because it tries to compile all the things from scratch for every little program we try to install, and that takes a lot of disk space and time. they should have an advice: "do not use in weak computers".

also I read the full nix manual but couldn't get used to writing nix derivations so I was feeling helpless when I couldn't write my custom things and that was frustrating.