Is asdf still the best way of install Elixir and Erlang on Linux?

I think so. I have Elixir, Erlang, Java, Nodejs and Rust all installed and managed with asdf.

Nope, it’s slower and with less features than mise. It’s superior in every way, though using asdf is not likely to stop you from developing your project of course.

Having containers with all your dev stuff is just wonderful after you get it all set up. I’m a solo developer and it’s still a win, but it will take you a weekend to iron out all your mount points, editor integrations etc.

I did use asdf for a while, but I recently switched over to mise. It feels faster and doesn’t seem to get in my way as much. I may be a weird edge case but I always found that asdf always seemed to insert itself into my workflow and block me on silly things. Granted I could have went and learned asdf a little better, but I prefer my tooling to be straight forward and not get in my way.

For me it is doing the job.

Is that still the case, though? IIRC, they migrated to Go some time ago. I tried mise a while back, and I couldn’t spot that big of a difference. What makes you like mise more than asdf these days - “it’s superior in every way” is kinda broad haha XD

If you’re already using Nix (or open to trying it), this is all you need in a flake.nix:

{
  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
  outputs = {nixpkgs, ...}: let
    systems = nixpkgs.lib.systems.flakeExposed;
  in {
    devShells = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs systems (system: let
      pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      beam-pkgs = pkgs.beam.packages.erlang_26;
    in {
      default = pkgs.mkShell {
        inherit (beam-pkgs) elixir erlang;
      };
    });
  };
}

Then nix develop and you’re done. Works the same on Linux and macOS.

I haven’t checked it after the rewrite so, fair call out, thank you.

“Superior in every way” was mostly coming from it having more features that I made use of, really. Maybe “bigger scope” would have been a better formulation.

It depends , I have recently installed Erlang/Elixir on Oracle Linux 8.5 and I had to use Kerl & Kiex because I do not want to risk updating some dependent packages for asdf “Latest one is using Go” in case the older versions is used by other applications

It is still the case, yes, at least imho.

While mise does play with your paths, it doesn’t use “shims” to make things work, which is one less thing to go wrong. Mise’s UX is also a bit more ergonomic and overall it is (still) faster IME.

We’ve moved our entire dev team over to mise, as a result, and it’s been happy times.

One place both asdf and mise have given fits is with the expert LS. They’ve had a few bugs with asdf and mise (and sometimes specific shells used with them), but it turns out that mise provides a good solution: set the LS command to mise exec -- expert --stdio, voila, not more breakages as expert will get the right environment set up for it without it having to figure out what the installer (mise, in this case) has done.