ok so i was setting up nixos, it was going good. there were a lot of docs to setup home manage and nix flakes and they are easy to do once you get some hang of it. But then i wanted to do a small project in c++ where i wanted to use a library libcpr. now you can not directly install that library and use it. (AFAIK). You have to create a flake in that project and then use it. Which BTW is the right way to do it. But also i just want to test run a 4 line code.

To achieve that you either have to do shell.nix or a devshell. Both of which have a documentation which is scattered. It took me 4 days and also help from nixos unofficial discord server to do it. In the end i had to make a nix devshell using a different repo which set it up for you. Then make a cmake file and then and only then i was able to use it. So it has a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning where everything sort of makes sense but nothing works. Again this was all for a 4 line code. In the end some one just suggested me to use docker instead. Which is a valid solution too. But i was already too deep into devshell so I didn't backtrack.