Computer audio users and developers need a reliable system, yet they also need to be able to explore new tools without compromising stability. Nix, the package manager, and NixOS, the distribution, provide exactly that:

NixOS is a declarative system. This means you define your entire system in a single text file. When you deploy such a configuration, it doesn't matter what the previous state was; you get exactly what you defined.

* No more re-installs, no matter how wild you hack!! Don't worry about upgrading or changing your system; if anything goes wrong you can boot into an older system.

* Backup, version and share the configuration of your entire system. This is also great for fault finding, for example on IRC.

Nix is a purely functional language; it treats packages like immutable values. This has the following advantages:

* Package isolation: Each package is only aware of its own dependency tree, so there is no danger of dependency hell. You can have multiple versions of libraries installed at once.

* Snapshots: Export just the parts of the system (i.e. a set of binaries plus their configuration) that you need to work on a music project so you can return to that project again in years to come without having to recreate the whole system.

* Collaboration: Share exactly the same tools with a collaborator so that you can work together without the risk of running into incompatibilities or corrupted files. Nix, the package manager, can even do this across distros.