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Docker and Nix are orthogonal; Docker is mostly a tool for packaging things in a standard way, Nix is a way of specifying build instructions.

But many people (ab)use Docker to solve the kinds of problems that Nix would have been better suited to solve.

Some people use Nix to build Docker images. They say it's very good for that.

It is, nix is more declarative than a dockerfile and can even optimize the layers based on the dependency graph. See https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images for a good explanation and https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-pkgs-dockerTool... for all of nix’s container related documentation.