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The nix language itself is fairly simple and it is intuitive. It's the abstractions on top of it that can be more confusing. Particularly nixpkgs.

> I first looked at nix-shell which you can use to create ephemeral environments just like Docker, with the difference that they are 100% reproducible and you don't need containerd or like.

Sounds like podman. What is the big differentiator from it?

nix shell is just another shell instance, with new things brought in via $PATH etc. Not a container, still part of your "current computer environment".

So more like virtualenv?

Sort of, but instead of being focused around a local directory, everything is stored in /nix/store/<hash>-<name>, declaratively created and reproducible, and there's a whole Linux distro built using that.

> It does not help that the docs are kind of meh

In my experience, they’ve improved massively over the last few years.

Most of the time, the docs directly explain how to solve some problem I have while also giving good context. I recently was messing with my boot loader and the docs were perfect