> As someone who tried Nix-- never understood what the big selling point is-- what can Nix do my existing tools can't? (without me spending 6 months) Right. T

> As someone who tried Nix-- never understood what the big selling point is-- what can Nix do my existing tools can't? (without me spending 6 months) Right. The benefits are clearer for DevOps than for developer workstations. (e.g. Nix makes it easy to declare the set of packages installed, with atomic rollbacks). For developers, I think it's still worth keeping an eye on, since Nix provides a programmatic way of dealing with packages of software; and dealing with packages of software is pretty much what a developer will need to do when driving their system. e.g. project READMEs typically list some commands for setting up a developer environment; Nix promises a consistent, single command for that (if projects provide Nix files). For most things that you can do with Nix, there's a quicker + dirtier approach already. e.g. VSCode allows isolated/ephemeral dev environments with remote containers; Docker provides an easy way to be confident software will run a certain way in other system; ZFS/btrfs snapshots allow for rolling back changes; nvm/rvm/asdf allow for project-specific versions of packages; apt-get/brew provide a way of installing packages to a system... Nix is an elegant and coherent solution to these kinds of problems. > Nix can create isolated environments, but as far as I see, you can only install the tools Nix repo supports. Not at all! -- It's comparable to e.g. Docker: With Docker, you can run containers using images served from DockerHub.. but you also have the option of building Docker images and using those. With Nix, you describe the packages/libraries/tools you want with Nix. This varies from trivially easy, to "have to really understand what you're doing" difficult.