The greatest feature of NixOS (in my opinion) is the ability to run what are called "ephemeral shells" -- that is, to be able to download and run software in an

The greatest feature of NixOS (in my opinion) is the ability to run what are called "ephemeral shells" -- that is, to be able to download and run software in an isolated environment without initially installing it; without it changing or damaging the main environment in any way. This is accomplished via the shell command: '$ nix-shell -p <name of software>'" i.e., $ nix-shell -p vim Where <name of software> can be found from over 100,000 packages (here): https://search.nixos.org/ https://search.nixos.org/ Functionally, the above is the equivalent of what Google Play Store, Apple App Store or Microsoft Store or what other Linux package managers are to their respective platforms... To install software permanently, edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to include the name from above (typically under environment.systemPackages), and follow up with: $ sudo nixos-rebuild switch Also, it's not too difficult to undo those changes should that be wished, but that's beyond the scope of a simple HN post... Anyway, in my opinion, NixOS is probably the most Software Developer friendly evolution of Unix since Linux itself. Well worth a try for technical people -- but there is a learning curve when trying to do very specific esoteric things with it(!)... but that's sort of the case with anything technological... That being said, there's lot more documentation about NixOS on the web these days than there was in the early days... so it may be worth a look!