Yea, the custom lang was annoying, got used to it, but like, why not just take something already made instead of making yet-another-language.

I luckily rarely have to run binaries, but when I do, I chuck the games into lutris, and non games something like steam-run.

Not sure about shell.nix, too vague to talk about. I will say though, that I found direnv + lorri + shell.nix (or flake.nix) very useful, lets me cd into a dir and all the packages needed for that project are available, without having to install them globally, other people will also benefit from this if shell.nix and .envrc are checked in to git.

I would probably get the hang of it eventually but I just couldn't be bothered, the annoying shit outweighs any potential benefits tbh.

Yup. I didn't have too many annoying problems for it to outweigh the benefits. I also have a server, so that weighs on benefits.