[abecedarius]

Maybe it's better now, but what I ran into in trying twice is that if you're not into installing by "curl | sh", then trying to build from source was an awful experience. It had out of date instructions for installing a whole lot of dependencies. I'd figure out one problem only to run into another, and another. Gave up both times, a few years in between.

[pxc]

There are a few really good ways to install Nix, including ones that people often invoke via `curl | sh`. If you prefer, you can download the exact same installers, and verify the checksums, read their code, etc. You don't have to actually use a different installer just to avoid `curl | sh`.

[chriswarbo]

There are distro packages out there, but those can also come with gotchas; e.g. IIRC Ubuntu's package was configured not to allow `/bin/sh` in sandboxes, which caused some things to break in obscure ways :-(