notes about nix and nixos (nixos.org)

i want to make it clearer. nix is a package manager. just like apt, pacman, brew and etc. its job is to make sure that when you request nodejs 22 lts, it gets you that. in most package managers its done by fetching compiled binary for your system and architecture. well, nix does the same, but it can also build it from sources or fetch from the official website, unpack it, and copy to the suitable locations, so it feels like you installed it with installation wizard. it achieves this result by writing something like dockerfile or aur pkgbuild config, but in a nix language.

short summary: nix is a package manager, and a language. i mean there is a package manager called nix, and its packages are build noscripts written in a nix language.

the largest nix packages repository is, well, nixpkgs. located in github.com/nixos/nixpkgs. to search from there you have a search.nixos.org website. it contains the very same build noscripts i mentioned above. there is also hydra (hydra.nixos.org) build system which monitors nixpkgs and builds them, so we have a ready-to-fetch pre built binaries, so you don't have to build them and spend an hour or more.

nixos on the other side is a linux distribution which includes nix package manager and some nice features like nixos modules and generations. that's said, you don't need to manually set up your system or use tools like ansible. the downside of this is you cannot use installation bash noscripts like rustup or nvm. practically you can do that, but nixos not meant for that. instead you have nixos modules, which helps you use higher level abstractions, set the domain, login, password and ports.

as a good analogy you can think of a nix project (a package, a module, a development environment) as a regular programming language project: npm or cargo. instead of writing an http server, you describe what should be installed and how it should be configured. you can set dependencies, for example the nixpkgs or some fancy helper library in your github repo, and use it. the output of your nix project would be just files and directories with ready to copy-and-paste into root of your file system (the sudo rm --rf / one)

in conclusion think about docker, but without any overhead. it is your system and you can write your systems all configurations (or dotfiles) in one place. everything you can do in ubuntu or arch linux can also be done in nixos, but a bit different.

nix as a package manager is available outside of linux, for example macos. i was using nix in macos (project is called nix-darwin, darwin is not about charles darwin the evolution theory one, just macos architecture is called darwin) and liked it. it means you can apply the nix paradigm in other os, or maybe not constrained with os only.

you can start your nix/nixos journey on xinux.uz

wish you luck!