I have some experience using docker/docker-compose, like world+dog. Mostly it's good. Docker is simple, or it can be if you don't over engineer things. Simple i

I have some experience using docker/docker-compose, like world+dog. Mostly it's good. Docker is simple, or it can be if you don't over engineer things. Simple is why docker got popular. The other reason it is popular is because it decouples to process of provisioning software from deployment and infrastructure provisioning which these days are separate activities typically done by different people/teams/organizations. Splitting responsibilities for this is a big win. If you self host all of that might be internal to your org but it still allows you to split the responsibility across teams. I have no experience with Nix. But a couple of red flags jump out of this thread for me are that "it's complicated", Haskell is somehow involved, and it is vaguely suggested that this is somehow similar to Docker. Which is clearly not the case. When it comes to putting stuff in a docker container, I guess you could use Nix. But why would you? It makes about as much sense as using Ansible or Puppet for that. Nothing against Haskell, but it evokes an image that might be a bit harsh to some but probably rings true to many: the wrong people getting excited for the wrong kind of reasons. I'm talking over-engineering here. People getting overly excited and creating a mess of hard to understand code that becomes a burden for whomever has to train up to maintain that code. People wielding hammers looking for ever more nails to wack. I've unceremoniously ditched multiple configuration languages over the years. Usually it feels good getting rid of all the over engineered crap when you realize you don't need most of it anymore. Of course the flip side is that what you replace it with might end up being similar. Been there and done that. However, I seem to only need a few lines of Dockerfile to replace what used to be a convoluted mess of puppet or ansible scripts to provision a thing that runs our thing. No longer needed. No more obsessing on how to, for example, get NTP tell the time to a server and why that somehow requires wrapping your head around a 600 line puppet module that does god knows what. Not a thing anymore. Nix sounds more like that than like Docker. I used to know people that actually used puppet to setup their laptop. Nix might be a better product for that. But I'm looking to minimize the need for that entirely. Dockerized development environments are great for that. A laptop with a browser running vs code is all you need these days. People are using freaking ipads to do development even.