Nix & NixOS
1. Introduction
Nix is a package manager for UNIX system, like Linux and MacOS.
One of my major gripes with Nix is how confusing its names are. Aside from “Nix” being very similar to “UNIX” and “Linux” (both often referred to as “`nix”), Nix itself has a lot of overlap:
- nix
- The Nix package manager.
- nix
- The programming language nix configuration files are written in. It has the same name as the package manager.
- NixOS
- A Linux distro built around the nix package manager.
- nixpkgs
- The community-maintained collection of nix packages and modules. GitHub repository