What is nix, and why should I care?

This exact question is why I avoid nix for so long. Specifically the "what is nix?" half. Nix is not one thing, but a collection of many things when most people say "nix". I wanted to clarify what things are to the best of my knowledge and give others what I had trouble finding in one convenient location when I was not knowing anything about nix in hopes that you understand better what things are, why I'm so pedantic, and possibly enable you to give things a shot with at least a direction to go that I had such trouble finding. With that out of the way, what the heck is it?!

Nix

Nix seems to be a catch all term for anything related to core tooling, the language, ect. If you are familiar at all with ZFS, it's likewise "a filesystem" but it's also an ecosystem of tooling that you gain massive benefit from using as opposed to using traditional tooling in it's place. Nix is much like that in regards to it being a set of tools that integrate tightly with each other.

The other definition that can be applied to nix is that it's a package manager. It's a declaritive system using Nix Expression Language (covered below). I encourage you to read about the nix package manager even as there is already a great breakdown of why it's great there, and I don't need to rehash that as I can't do a better job.

Nix expression language

Nix expression language is written in a functional style. It's used to describe anything that is in the nix ecosystem. All tools are written in this one style, which allows you to have less languages to learn to create anything that you want to integrate into the system. Because of it's pure functional nature, this means that results are in most cases able to be reproduced bit for bit identical. This reduces the classic "It works on my machine", and hard to debug errors down to almost none. If this sounds similar to what Docker or other OCI containers solve to a point, you would be correct. This extends to much much more than containers though.Nix expression language great for writing build systems, making reproducable containers, creating dev environments, building operating systems that are bit for bit identical on real hardware, the list goes on.

Nixpkgs

This one is simple. It's a list of packages avaliable to the nix package manager. There's several repositories avaliable, it supports something similar to Gentoo's overlays or the AUR from Arch. You can read more about it here.

Home-Manager

I've talked about this on more than one occasion, and never fully defined what it is. home-manager is tooling that allows you to define how user's files, applications, configs, ect are all set up. As opposed to installing packages one by one like you can use nix-env to do, it brings it all together similar to how pmm does for many systems, but gives you all of the power of Nix Expression Language to be able to set up logic instead of doing manual work. It can invoke basically "anything the nix ecosystem can do", but that's the simple answer.

NixOS

NixOS is what happens if you take home manager, and give all of that power to your operating system. Have a fully redeployable operating system on real hardware that can describe not only what's installed, but how it's configured from networking, to system services, to what docker containers will be running. All within Nix Expression Language. It has integrations with home-manager to allow everything to be fully integrated while still offering you portable users. No more installing a distro and then configuring it, worrying about config file changes with updates lingering and breaking over time. It's all written in Nix, and will all work every time, exactly the same way. Even if you try to manually edit config files, they are immutable and regenerated so nothing can really damage the system from the outside as you can simply regenerate everything. Roll back to previous definitions, all without filesystem snapshotting. It's fully extensible and the only limits are what time you are willing to put into it.

Nix-Darwin

While not as integrated as NixOS, this allows you to manage many aspects of MacOS in a similar way. Nix-Darwin has integrations with home-manager so you can get most of the power without leaving all of your Mac specific apps behind.

Nix Flakes

If you ever search Nix, you'll see this being talked about constantly. For the moment, I'm avoiding it until it gets marked as stable, but it looks promising. As I am not using this experimental feature, I'll suggest you go read about it here.

Ok, but what can I do with all of that power?

I can't even begin to pretend like I can understand the full power of what is possible, but I'll list a few things that you may find interesting. These are things that I may play with and I'll document anything that I do and share my thoughts.

Nix-Direnv: Portable dev environments
Comma: Run ephemeral commands
Better PMM:: Manage packages in a central, portable, place.
Manage docker: Docker-compose, but not learning a new language
Nixified terraform: Why learn terraform when you already know nix?
CI/CD: All devs need CI/CD. Why not bring that in too?

What's a nix?