What Is Nix?
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What Is Nix?
1–10 of 344 posts
Re: What Is Nix?
#2I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
Re: What Is Nix?
#3I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
What is Nix?
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.
What is NixOS?
NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.
[1]: https://nixos.org/
Re: What Is Nix?
#4I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
It’s a package manager that underlies NixOS.
It can also be run under any other Linux distro, and macOS.
Re: What Is Nix?
#5I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
Nix is a package manager. NixOS is an OS which includes the Nix package manager. My understanding is that a feature of Nix is you can declare an OS (I.e. declare the collection of configurations and software etc for an OS) which Nix will process to provide you with an OS called NixOS.
Re: What Is Nix?
#6I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
POSIX (eg. Linux), Mac and Windows. Yes, it is magnificent.
Immutable, deterministic software on all 3 major platforms. Combined with cached build artifacts, builds and their outputs (including complete target system updates/upgrades) are blisteringly fast, cryptographically secure and completely deterministic.
EDIT: Sorry, yes; Windows only via WSL, not natively on Windows proper.
Re: What Is Nix?
#7I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
It is pretty easy to be confused. Especially since it is also a language yet all the other replies at the time have writing have failed to mention that.
While I like the project as a whole, their naming is horrible. Just wait until you get into `nix-env` vs `nix-shell` etc...
Re: What Is Nix?
#8I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
One really cool thing about NixOS is you declare the OS just like you might a DockerFile, and you can choose which configuration file you use at booting time. This lets you install applications just during up-time (to try out a new tool), add it to the configuration file if you like it, and roll back to the version before if it breaks something. Versions are declarative too (PSql == X.X.X) and upgrades/downgrades are set there too. If I want to share an environment with someone I can just share the configuration file minus the secrets.
Re: What Is Nix?
#9I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
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Re: What Is Nix?
#10I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
What is Nix? Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments. What is NixOS? NixOS is a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Bu…
Thanks, but that makes me wonder how that's even possible given that distros make their own modifications? Do people port each distro's packages to Nix then? Are they kept up-to-date? Or does it automatically translate from apt/pacman/etc. databases somehow? Or does it just basically install vanilla packages on all distro?