I've been using flox for around a year and have been pretty happy with it. It's had a few growing pains, but overall has been very reliable. I adopted it as I wanted something to install up to date development tools on top of my OS (Debian stable) and looked at flox and devenv, I went with flox as it supported zsh, which devenv didn't at the time.
I only have a few CLI/TUI programs installed with it, I try to keep it to a minimum. Just my editor, several language servers, AI tools and some other VM/container tooling. I haven't needed to break out of the happy path with it as of yet. I follow Nix progress with hopes of it eventually maturing into something better to use directly, but given the current state I prefer the wrappers at this point.
I only have a few CLI/TUI programs installed with it, I try to keep it to a minimum. Just my editor, several language servers, AI tools and some other VM/container tooling. I haven't needed to break out of the happy path with it as of yet. I follow Nix progress with hopes of it eventually maturing into something better to use directly, but given the current state I prefer the wrappers at this point.