Can someone explain NixOS to me like I'm absolutely clueless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by KISSmyOS@lemmy.world to c/nixos@infosec.pub

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I've been hearing a lot about it lately and I'm intrigued, but also utterly confused.

Is this a Linux distro I'd install on bare metal because it offers a new way of package management that addresses the issues other distros have?
Is it something I install in the distro I currently use?
How does it work and what does it do?

I've tried to read https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works but the first sentence is

"Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as Haskell"

and that's where it lost me. Thanks for helping me understand!

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[-] uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah! Its a package manager, with its own repos. It needs its own becauseof all those guarentees above. Its designed to be installed on any linux distro, and also has windows, mac, and docker versions.

If you want it to be all nix all the time, thereis also a distro NixOS thats uses nix from front to back.

And, in a confusing failure of naming, the language you use to configure nix is also called nix, just to be cool.

this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023

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NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager. Its declarative configuration allows reliable system upgrades via several official channels of stability and size.

This community discusses NixOS, Nix, and everything related.

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