> can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years

> can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years ago was that oh it's a package manager, maybe like the old BSD packagesource thing, great. but then "NixOS" came in and seemed to confuse things. Yes. On the download page[0] you have two sections: Nix (the one you were looking at), and NixOS (which is packaged as a traditional disk image).