Nix runs on any linux distro because all packages are stored in /nix, so it's not trampling all over your files in /usr, /bin, etc. It also runs on OS X (packag

Nix runs on any linux distro because all packages are stored in /nix, so it's not trampling all over your files in /usr, /bin, etc. It also runs on OS X (packages work, but are a bit less well tested, and the binary replacements are currently not as easily available as they should be). In the past it has been made to run on BSD and Windows through Cygwin, but these need a lot more work before being production ready. It's also significantly more flexible than other package managers due to how it can handle multiple versions of the same package in an elegant way. This makes unifying diverse package sets an actual possibility. Apt, yum, etc are too limited to unify package sets in this way, an creating another layer above them in order to integrate them is hacky, ugly, and unlikely to work well.