This is a mystery you don’t want to solve.
Nix (and more specifically, NixOS) made me switch to Linux as my daily driver.
I had been using Windows since 3.11 as my daily driver, MS DOS before that. This was for web browsing, gaming, and development. Linux was my sandbox on the side, and mostly server OS throughout the years.
Goes to show how powerful packagemanagers can be, it made me make the full switch after ~30 years. I love how my OS is now idempotent/declarative.
I have no idea what the actual reason is, I am just responding to the German language aspect.
In Dutch the word “niks” means nothing.
If Mr. Dolstra used a “nothing” reference, wouldn’t it make more sense that the Dutch person referenced the Dutch word “niks”, which is pronounced exactly the same way as Nix?
As far as conjecture goes this is far more plausible than a Dutch guy picking a German word “nichts” that resembles the pronunciation of the word/name Nix.
And for some reason Hollywood has engrained on society the notion that the Dutch natively speak German. Some of them learn it, but it is not their native language.
Oh it certainly wasn’t the first I have ever used.
Debian, Ubuntu, Kali, and more.
This is just the first one that has made me ‘want to make the shift’, so to speak.
I specialize professionally in hyper automation of all sorts of things. Long time user of PowerShell, custom built C++/C#/Java backend services. More recently also utilizing Python and Rust.
The declarative nature of NixOS (incl. Flakes, idempotent ❤️) is what I love about it. Although I am well aware it can be quite daunting for those that prefer imperative scripting, or even ClickOps.