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Comment by enbugger | Hacker News Reader

> NixOS is quickly becomming the biggest and best tool there is. It will guarantee that your code will run exactly the same way, even 100 years in the future. Docker, Conda, and similar tools are better, but NixOS gives more comprehensive guarantees.

I like how this is dropped as a fact. Dare to explain why though? Especially vs Docker. NixOS is not even standardized. No guarantees it will not be superseded by some descedant or eg. Guix in a near decade.

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Regarding the biggest: nixpkgs sits at around 140k packages, way more than others.

Best: I still argue that Docker and Conda are more accessible, but my point was to go for reproducible, declarative science. Nix environments are exactly that. They're not perfect and are, as you point out, not standardized. But they cover much more ground that Docker. If you trust the upstream nix repo, you can get bit-level equality at every single build you (or anyone else) does. Docker relies on huge binary blobs that you can't inspect and that can be pretty much arbitrarily swapped around.

I'm totally fine if Guix takes over. Or the next big thing. As long as it's declarative and reproducible.

In my work (scientific or otherwise), I try to avoid dependencies if possible. That's not always possible, so a solution like Docker or NixOS is needed, but the problem can be improved a lot without a technical solution. Either feels like fighting an uphill battle though as most researchers think short term and just pick whatever is convenient in the moment.

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