It's not our standard dev environment but some of us use Nix. We don't really use Docker much, though. Mostly just "go test" etc.

Loving this. Honestly I keep encouraging folks to just TRY native Nix for dev environments. So easy to set up and get value on day 1 that you'd be shocked. Also models/LLMs have made lightyear strides in the last few months to help with everything around it. We've been building up Nix based skill systems into our Flox skill and it's been super meaningful both on adoption and when we need to scale it up. (disclaimer I do Flox.dev which is Nix based and we do cool Nix stuff)

I'd guess that there is an insignificant minority of people who strongly prefer nix over anything else.

And it might be because it is easy to provide and maintain compared to a .deb package.

When I was writing rust stuff a few years ago it seemed like nix was the hip cool thing all the up and coming rustaceans (mostly unemployed students trying to land faang jobs) were using. If you're not familiar with the rust community it's very different from other programming communities I've been in (python/go/ruby/etc). Almost felt like you'd be kicked out of their lunch table if you weren't using it, but I've only see it that ubiquitous there.

A lot of them, instead of learning the usual linuxii you'll be using in containers at work dive headfirst into nix.