The performance relative to the size of the data set is handled by the other tools you use. Flox gets out of your way and bring those tools to wherever you need them, however you want to use them.
Specifically, 83% of enterprise CIOs plan to repatriate at least some workloads back to private cloud/on-prem according to a Barclays CIO Survey program
Workloads are starting to converge back to on-prem and there hasn't been so much pressure on only cloud. Hybrid approaches seem to be prevailing (for much larger co's)
Hi! Flox employee here and pulled from our Head of Product:
Flox will match the most compatible Nixpkgs version given the declaration in the manifest. We are working on a robust service to allow better searching across time to dramatically expand the amount of software available.
We're working on a few solutions to this--allowing flake references in the Flox manifest and offering a robust solution as a product feature.
Flox is compatible with language specific package manager--and provides suggestions and auto detection of existing package managers. You can use the Flox shell hook to initialize the project in the language specific package manager of choice and Flox will suggest this to you if it sees you're using a known package manager (such as requirements.txt for pip, yarn.lock for yarn, etc).
Re: your zsh experience, it's hard to judge exactly what's happening from your comment but we have had other users where the state of activation was suppressed by themes which can cause "environment already active". https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/637 - if you think it's something else or have more detail to share, let us know (either here, github, anywhere).
(Flox employee here)