NixOS also has package maintainers, which the author of this blog post relies on (see "nixos.graphviz").
Traditional distributions also allow you to package your own software.
The difference between a traditional distribution and NixOS is that NixOS makes packaging your own software (and config) easily and safely enough to treat as first-class citizens along with the distro's own packages. So much so that I don't think of NixOS packages as "packages". Rather, I just see them as config/code.
Compare my super-optimised dockerfile results:
$ docker images | grep xena xena/christinewebsite latest eb8c27a1a5d2 12 seconds ago 121MB
To the naiive nix results:
$ docker images | grep xena xena/christinewebsite latest b087ad7fb924 50 years ago 102MB
This image ends up only including my blog (statically compiled), ca certificates (because of the patreon integration), time zone data files (because of the go time package), iana port numbers (something to do with the go net package) and mailcap (for some reason). It's puny!
couldn't you simply do a multi-stage docker-image (in the not-nix situation),where you just copy over the go binary into the final docker-image, and add the needed files?
In theory I could do the multi-stage docker approach to get an as-tiny-as-possible setup (and I actually do this: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/master/Dockerfile) but that won't cover ca-certificates generically.
So a simple apt get install package is all I need.
This looks like having to write packages again and that’s the very reason I use a Debian based distribution is for apt