How does this differ from the tooling that lets you build containers from nix?

When I worked on an enterprise data analytics platform, a big problem was docker image growth. People were using different python versions, different cuda versions, all kinds of libraries. With Cuda being over a gigabyte, this all explodes.

The solution is to decompose the docker images and make sure that every layer is hash equivalent. So if people update their Cuda version, it result in a change within the Python layers.

But it looks like Flox now simplifies this via Nix. Every Nix package already has a hash and you can combine packages however you would like.