Docker solves "distributing software is hard" by using container images; so you copy the container image, and running that will work consistently everywhere. N

Docker solves "distributing software is hard" by using container images; so you copy the container image, and running that will work consistently everywhere. Nix solves "distributing software is hard" by ensuring declarations of packages can be built/run in a reproducible way. Software built with Nix doesn't need to run in a container runtime (which is much nicer for desktop / workstations). Nix's strength is dealing with packages in a programmatic way. This allows it to also serve as a package manager (like brew or pacman), as a way of declaring an OS configuration (in NixOS), it can also be used to build container images, or VM images.