Basically, nix (and guix, which is based on it) is the only package manager that actually solves the dependency hell problem properly.
It makes builds reproducible, and basically a package will depend on it’s inputs’ hashes. So you can not only install multiple versions of the same package that is solved by some package managers although in hacky ways, you can install multiple ones that only differ in eg which libc version they link to.
In this way, I do think that it is truly revolutionary - but it is a package manager (and NixOS makes basically the OS a big package). Flatpak and snap try to do this as well, in an objectively worse way, but they also provide different features, so they are not in competition. I would rather like to see flatpak and snap employ nix for solving the package management problem and build on top of it. That would actually make the linux solution better than what we have on other OSs.
It makes builds reproducible, and basically a package will depend on it’s inputs’ hashes. So you can not only install multiple versions of the same package that is solved by some package managers although in hacky ways, you can install multiple ones that only differ in eg which libc version they link to.
In this way, I do think that it is truly revolutionary - but it is a package manager (and NixOS makes basically the OS a big package). Flatpak and snap try to do this as well, in an objectively worse way, but they also provide different features, so they are not in competition. I would rather like to see flatpak and snap employ nix for solving the package management problem and build on top of it. That would actually make the linux solution better than what we have on other OSs.