Let me know when every project builds with cmake and maybe I'd agree. OpenSSL and Boost do not. They aren't alone in choosing other build systems. Nix is the only real sane choice in my mind unless you absolutely need win msvc. You can cache, securely and sanely, all build artifacts at a package level. You can target and build for multiple arch, compiler, libc combos. Repeating a dev env or build is dead simple since even the toolchain is included. You don't get that sort of repeatable build environment without extra work elsewhere. You get it almost for free with Nix. You can reuse the work with more than just cmake or C/C++ projects with is a reality of our new and growing language world.