This is a CI/CD system. It's not made to configure a single machine from coded configuration, but to build, test, publish software for multiple targets and then manage deployment to different clusters.
Nix builds, tests and publishes more than 80,000 packages, continuously on every commit, for multiple target platforms, via one monorepo.. without Docker.
It’s not just for building machines, that is NixOS and its module system, which is a library you can use with the build tool.
It’s possible to build your own Nix-based monorepo internally at your company, too, and still ship containers in production (that are also built by Nix, again, without Docker).
Dagger is not a CI provider, it is a build tool and task runner. Integrating Nix with CI is the same deal as integrating Dagger with CI.
Enter my biased opinion, as someone leading a team through solving the problems this tool purports to solve, but by using Nix: this tool will suffer from the same fatal flaws that Docker does, by being built on its foundation (Buildkit). It is abstracting dependency management at the application build level, whereas Nix solves it at the fundamental system dependency level.
This is a CI/CD system. It's not made to configure a single machine from coded configuration, but to build, test, publish software for multiple targets and then manage deployment to different clusters.