If you want to enjoy even more pain, ah trivia I mean, NXOS and NXOS are not the same thing. Read it again. There is an NXOS train for the original 2/5/7K and current kit in that line, and there is another version for the 3/9K new kit from the ACI spin in. They are just different enough that it makes things difficult when you are trying to develop tools for them. Cisco has promised to merge the two for a long time now.
IOS-XE is essentially IOS Classic running as an application on top of Linux, communicating with the actual forwarding hardware. NX-OS is similar but without legacy of having been a standalone OS. Linux generally stays away from all networking work and just provides a nicer deployment target with nicer APIs than bare bones MIPS/PPC/x86
https://medium.com/@Meela349588204/using-cows-to-explain-the...