8. Learn more
This completes your Zero to Nix journey! You just accomplished a great deal:
- You installed Nix on your machine
- You ran some programs using Nix
- You explored some Nix development environments
- You searched for packages in Nixpkgs and elsewhere in the Nix ecosystem
- You built some Nix packages
And that’s just to name a few. We’re thrilled that you’ve taken the time and made the effort. But we hope that your Nix journey continues onward. This guide suggests some areas beyond the scope of the quick start where you can apply your newly won Nix knowledge.
Build container images
Nix can build packages for many things, from standard tools like curl and Git to Vim plugins to Visual Studio Code extensions to web services that you write in your preferred language and far beyond. We’ve covered a few of these package types here in the quick start. Another powerful Nix feature is that you can use it to build OCI-compliant container images and thereby replace tools like Docker and Podman (at least when it comes to building images).
Use NixOS as your operating system
NixOS is a Linux distribution built on Nix and its core principles, such as reproducibility and declarative configuration.
Configure your home environment
Home Manager is a plugin-based tool built on Nix that you can use to configure a wide range of tools in your home environment, including Vim, tmux, Visual Studio Code, Git, gpg, and shells like Bash, zsh, and fish.
Continuous integration
You learned about Nix development environments earlier in the quick start. Because Nix development environments are both cross platform and fully reproducible, they’re quite useful in continuous integration environments.