It's a bit confusing (and the old site did a better job explaining this), but basically, you have two separate projects: Nix (a package manager/build system) and NixOS (a standalone Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager).
can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years ago was that oh it's a package manager, maybe like the old BSD packagesource thing, great. but then "NixOS" came in and seemed to confuse things.
all good stuff but wow that website needs to be reorganized.
Yes, I agree it needs to be fixed. I noted this source of confusion earlier and appreciate the confirmation. Will be working on getting a disambiguation header on the main download page soon.
You’re on the right track. Nix is a package manager you can use on just about any Linux distribution, and also MacOS. NixOS is a Linux distro built with and including Nix (and using Nixpkgs as its package repo).
Nix is also the name of the functional programming language created to describe packages in Nix the package manager.
Nix is also a pun on the word meaning “nothing”, which is a nod to how it’s all purely functional.
> can i use the nix package manager without using nixos? is that what the "install" link I referred towards is setting up ? my original impression of nix years ago was that oh it's a package manager, maybe like the old BSD packagesource thing, great. but then "NixOS" came in and seemed to confuse things.
Yes. On the download page[0] you have two sections: Nix (the one you were looking at), and NixOS (which is packaged as a traditional disk image).
