I just switched one of my systems over to NixOS from Arch and so far it seems interesting. One question I had is regarding the nix-shell. So I get the basic concept of it and that it allows creating a shell that has packages installed with that shell making ideal for dev environments. I’ve even seen talks where the suggest nix-shells over docker/podman, my question is how is persistent data (like databases) handled?
Nix shell basically just downloads the software (if it’s not already downloaded) and then modifies your PATH to include the new software.
Persistent data stay persistent.
Nix shell has one use case common with docker (local development), but other than that the solutions are not similar at all.