“I never know if running brew install or brew upgrade is going to take 5 seconds or 20 minutes.”
Homebrew is the first thing every developer installs on a new Mac, and it still can’t tell you whether it’s about to compile half the internet. Nix gives you predictable installs and throwaway shells for one-off tools. The price is learning a functional language to install ripgrep. Developers keep choosing the tool that breaks over the tool that needs reading.