[tomberek]

Nix is a package manager. But it can weave together multiple package managers so it frees you from being locked in to any one particular language, OS, architecture. The proof of this that we also ended up making a full OS (NixOS). Then there are follow-on things one can do, such as using it to manage the configuration of things and people continue to build more tools for this.

Fundamentally the core technology is for it to be a correct and safe package manager. (eg: think about the engineering tradeoffs for memory-safety vs anything-goes) Once you have that basic primitive, lots of things can be "packages": software, data, configuration, dotfiles,......