After hearing about it for a long time and also mentioning it I finally wanted to try nix (not NixOS though).
I usually have GNU stow installed on every box I admin and use to allow for some at-least-partially-sane workflow of installing non-os-package-manager software.
As usual I can't just download and test something, so I wanted to use the opportunity to try out purescript. Sadly it involves both Node.js and cabal, so to cut a long story short... I gave up, even after some help from the #nixos irc channel. You can set the npm prefix and stuff will be installed somewhere, but packaging node deps apparently isn't as easy as 1-2-3.
I don't really like their install procedure of curl|sh, so I downloaded, edited the script and manually ran it, but it looked rather well-written.
Anyway, on one one host I'm now running these things from nix instead of manually built with stow:
- the silver searcher
- chruby
- node
- tmux 2.2
So yeah, success so far, and I'm liking it, although despite their "don't worry, we have binaries" node.js version 6.1.0 had to be built both on x86 and amd64.