I don’t know how I never heard about CheckInstall! This is great.

Can Nix do what CheckInstall does, or do you need to manually build a Nix package for the program version that you want to install?

I mostly use nix with direnv so I never have to install anything globally and, between overrides and a minimal understanding of how to write a custom package, it’s surprisingly easy to get the tools you need for each project.