I'll have to check out devbox, thanks for the link. I don't understand why Nix doesn't have some way for derivations to claim that they install certain artifacts, which would make searching so much easier.

The version thing is also really annoying, thanks for the helpful link, I hadn't seen that. Not sure how this will work in a Flakes world. Seems weird to me that sometimes packages are important enough to have multiple derivations each installing a different version (like the pythonFull packages) but there is no standard/good/default solution for it.