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I'd describe nix as "programmatic package management". Nix is a difficult tool to learn, but very powerful. A lot of nice UX use cases with Nix could perhaps be described as "like Docker, without the containers".

In terms of applying configs, ansible is 'convergent', where Nix is 'congruent'. https://blog.flyingcircus.io/2016/05/06/thoughts-on-systems-... (ansible will make changes to get it closer to a target state, whereas nix will reach the target state by constructing the target state again).



Thank you. As someone who uses containers a lot (even to run local programs, shout out to https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...) this makes some sense to me.

I'm a little way into the Nix Pills document (https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/why-you-should-give-it-a-...) which seems to start the explanation from a place where I can understand.


X11 is pretty poor for security, you should use Flatpak as it has sandboxing and still stores all its files in one directory.




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