There's two different use cases: - development - production For development, using Nix or Guix is in my opinion extremely nice. Using Docker in development w

There's two different use cases: - development - production For development, using Nix or Guix is in my opinion extremely nice. Using Docker in development would mean mounting your dev directory as a volume into a dev-container and depending on your application, this might end up being a pain in the ass. Editors often depend on the same dependencies to compile your code on the go and check for errors - if you don't have these on the host, you will then have to start solving new problems. With Nix, you can have a package definition and either install all the necessary dependencies globally on your machine or spawn a shell with all of the needed binares in your PATH. Recently an application needed a different Node version than the one that was globally installed on my machine. Instead of having to build a Dockerfile or whatever, I just spawned a shell with the newer Node version, ran the command that I needed and was done. For production, you might still want to use Docker, as there's a lot of great software built on top of it (Kubernetes and other platform-specific managed services). You can turn a Nix/Guix package definition into a Docker image quite easily, if you already have one. As extra benefit, you remove the small chance of still ending up with incompatible dependencies that you get when using a traditional package manager in a Dockerfile.