[soraminazuki]

With a shell script, you get to enjoy all the pains of building software and its dependencies from scratch. Even then, you wouldn't be even halfway done. You'd also need to go through the process of turning your ad-hoc procedures into a reproducible script only to find out that it broke months later.

Nix provides better abstractions and composability to make that experience far less painful. Note that in my previous example, I didn't need to specify how to build OpenSSL or Nginx. I was able to reuse the definition from Nixpkgs and apply my own customizations to it.