| title | description | layout |
|---|---|---|
About Zero to Nix |
What it is, why we made it, and how it fits into the [Nix](/concepts/nix) ecosystem |
plain |
Zero to Nix is a highly opinionated learning resource for Nix created by Determinate Systems. We believe Zero to Nix fills a major gap for two reasons:
- We find most of the existing Nix documentation to be difficult to navigate for beginners. Sources like the Nixpkgs manual, the official website, Nix Pills, and semi-official sources like nix.dev are all great once you have a strong sense of how Nix works and what it provides. We encourage you to explore them and we even link them in many places in Zero to Nix. But together they can be daunting to the uninitiated, and we wanted to provide a gentle "front end" to the official documentation sources.
- We strongly believe that flakes are the future of Nix and that people onboarding into Nix should use them from the get-go. But flakes are currently marked as an experimental feature of Nix and are thus not discussed in any of the official Nix documentation sources (with the exception of the Wiki entry for flakes).
First, as mentioned above, Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated. But Zero to Nix also deviates from official recommendations in that it recommends installing Nix using Nix Installer rather than the official Nix installation script.
There's nothing wrong with the official Nix installation script—far from it!—and we don't dissuade you from using it. But we feel pretty strongly that Nix Installer is more likely to offer a smooth experience for newcomers.