Thanks, in many regards, Nix is already much better than Conda/Homebrew/Flatpak ... and we (the Nix community) are working very hard to improve the remaining weaknesses.
The quick answer of the question "Why this project makes a sense ?" is following:
Nix is solving the principal problems of software building, distribution, deployment, configuration, supply chain security and many others in very elegant but unique way. It also comes with plenty of other unique features which doesn't exist anywhere else. The cost of this is quite steep learning and adoption curve.
geospatial-nix.today is lowering those bariers to minimum.
Why we narrowed our scope to geospatial software and services ?
Nixpkgs - the software collection built by Nix is the largest software repository on the planet, containing around 80 000 packages. You can use any of those packages via geospatial-nix, but geo software and services gets additional level of QA and maintenance. Also, we want to provide other extra features which make a sense if you are geo user or developer. I believe that we can provide higher added value if we concentrate our effort to one domain.
geospatial-nix author here. Thanks for your interest.
geospatial-nix.today is the UI for creation of development and working environments using Nix. It provides easy instructions to get Nix running on your Linux machine, UI to declaratively configure your environment and tools for building container images.
As you can read in the FUTURE PLANS section, we are in very early stage of development. Please take this to account. Features like support for many more services, Mac support, production deployment to Kubernetes will land soon.