Nix, the package manager

In previous emails, I've written briefly about Nix. Over the next few days, I want to write more about it and explain the different components of the Nix ecosystem and how I use them.

Firstly, Nix is a package manager, similar to apt on Ubuntu or homebrew on MacOS.

It contains over 100,000 packages that can be installed once you've installed Nix and if you're on a Mac, there's nix-darwin to have it manage macOS settings too.

There are two stable releases a year and a rolling "unstable" version so you can be as stable or up-to-date as you like, or you can mix and match in the same configuration.

It's easy to add custom packages and apply overrides to existing packages.

You can have multiple versions of the same package installed at once.

And because Nix is reproducible, you can get exactly the same configuration over and over again.

In another email, I'll write about NixOS, but you don't need to use it to use Nix the package manager.

I used a different Linux distribution when I started using Nix and installed it as a secondary package manager.

If you're looking for an alternative package manager for Linux or macOS, I recommend giving Nix a try.