I know that this has been asked in past threads but I would love to understand how Nix compares to containers and on top of that what does flox provide in it's comparison to containers?
1. A more reproducible environment thanks to nix determinism 2. A more widely re-usable base approach in the form of environments vs containers
with flox, you can develop software in a development environment that matches the way the software will be packaged. Then, you can distribute this software so that someone can just run "flox install" on Mac, Linux, Windos WSL2, or it can be loaded into a docker container image and deployed that way.
FROM python
FROM nodejs
RUN sh -c 'python ... | node ...'
There are other benefits such as: - minimal containers - automatic extraction of artifacts and their runtime-dependencies - no more pushing your compilers into prod - no cleaning steps (apt-cache clean) - declarative - reproducible - more fun!