I had the opposite experience because I want to run a lot of software in random repos.
I can make a nix-shell for each project but then every nix upgrade was forcing me to go through a lengthy reinstall + wrecking compatibility sometimes.
Not to mention the amount of derivations I had to write myself just to use latest packages.
Using things like virtualenv instead of nix-shell can fix the general instability, but packaging is too big of a problem.
> because I want to run a lot of software in random repos.
Containers, and snapshots+clones are your friend. For a while I was doing ZFS snapshots and clones of Gentoo userlands.
However, if you knew how bad things really are with glibc and how not-well designed Linux is to resist badly behaving software, and how easily some big players can inject badly behaving software into the channels you are fetching from, you would probably seriously consider Qubes.
illumos is a kernel you can rely on to run somewhat arbitrary software.
I can make a nix-shell for each project but then every nix upgrade was forcing me to go through a lengthy reinstall + wrecking compatibility sometimes.
Not to mention the amount of derivations I had to write myself just to use latest packages.
Using things like virtualenv instead of nix-shell can fix the general instability, but packaging is too big of a problem.
I went back to Arch.