It&#x27;s an odd comparision, because Nix and Guix both include tools for making virtual machines and containers.  I think the better comparison would be virtualizing&#x2F;containerizing traditional distributions like Debian vs. using Nix&#x2F;Guix.<p>With a traditional distro, you need to use a handful of additional tools like Vagrant, Docker, Ansible, etc. as well as several additional package managers to get everything setup.  With Nix and Guix, you use a single package manager and single suite of tools to provision local environments, with or without virtualization.  Those environments are declarative, reproducible, can be rolled back, etc.  It&#x27;s a <i>much</i> cleaner way to work.