When you spend eight hours coding on your work computer, you make lots of little tweaks to improve workflow. If you then do nearly no coding on your home computer, it's unlikely that you will perform the same tweaks. I try to keep my systems set up almost identically, but that's a lot of work. (I now try to use ansible for that but after playing around for a bit I'm having doubts if it was the right choice. Keeping everything in sync is not exactly ergonomic.)
Some particular quirk of autocompletion could become almost pure muscle memory, and if it's suddenly missing, you notice.
Work computer is windows with wsl, home computer is Ubuntu. Work computer I need to develop in IntelliJ and vscode. At home I can use copilot or local LLMs, at work I cannot (nor several other useful extensions) At work I use maven and I have to spend 15minutes dinking with project settings anytime I need to compile a new project. At home I have admin privs, at work it’s a set of hoops to get temporary admin access so I forgo things like system environment variables.
I am skeptical that nix or home manager would solve these problems. So I just have a specific setup at work, that is typically more advanced and automated than my home system. My leet code interviews suffer because of this. Just makes me realize that coding interviews using an environment that does not mimic the workplace is just excluding senior developers (read: old people) who don’t have the time or patience to jump through these hoops for 15minutes of placating a recently hired college grad
Nix evangelists should seriously consider putting the breaks on advertising Nix until its horrible UX is fixed. I’m struggling to even discuss Nix as an option at work because every engineer I bring it up to has had bad first impressions.
Some particular quirk of autocompletion could become almost pure muscle memory, and if it's suddenly missing, you notice.