The about page sums its features up pretty well, see if there's anything that particularly appeals to you there: http://nixos.org/nix/about.html http://nixos.o

The about page sums its features up pretty well, see if there's anything that particularly appeals to you there: http://nixos.org/nix/about.html http://nixos.org/nix/about.html Also the HN link in my previous comment has some good discussion of it, just scroll down past the initial Docker comparison thread. For me the main benefit of it is that I trust it. It doesn't take over system directories like Homebrew, which bugs me even though I'm on a single-user system where that should be ok. Both installs and uninstalls are deterministic, complete, and don't screw anything else up in the system. You can install different versions of the same package side-by-side, which the Debian and Red Hat Alternatives systems also enable, but Nix is more sophisticated about it tagging everything with a cryptographic hash of its build tree. MacPorts and pkgsrc may also provide some of this, but Nix feels more like the git of package managers than anything else I've used, eg the one that finally gets packaging right.