What Ansible does is just one part of the Nix picture. Nix brings a lot more: - Language agnostic software packaging - Package manager - Ephemeral dev enviro

What Ansible does is just one part of the Nix picture. Nix brings a lot more: - Language agnostic software packaging - Package manager - Ephemeral dev environments - A purely functional config language (it has lambdas - you can build abstractions) - Closures - Nix knows every single dependency your system needs down to git revisions - Binary caching. Everything is built from source, but you can safely download binaries that are known to be built from the exact same deps you need. - Ergonomic cross-compilation - NixOS modules allow for composable, modular system config. For instance, my home computers all import a shared scanner.nix file that sets up scanner drivers and installs scanner software. Sharing config across machines is so easy with Nix. - Rollbacks - you can edit your system (even swapping out gfx drivers or the kernel) and if it doesn't work, trivially rollback. As in you can restart your computer and choose to boot into the previous config. - Easily modify _any_ dependency. You can apply patches, point at a fork, or just tweak its packaging. - I am surely forgetting stuff! It does a lot.