My understanding of nix terms

The nix trinity

nix

Is "just" a package manager + programming language attached to it. It is not necessarily connected to nixpkgs or NixOS. You could just create your own package repository and or distro. The package manager can also run standalone on basically any distro without needing something like NixOS.

nixpkgs

A git repository with loads of recipes of packages and tools to build them more easily.

The lib that you "import" like this {lib, ...}: {} is coming from here.
it also technically contains NixOS though it is mostly separate, there are some shared parts, but no dependencies as far as i know

NixOS

A distro build upon nix and nixpkgs. It lives in the same repo as nixpkgs

Houses tools like nixos-rebuild
And switch-to-configuration framework

Other big concepts

flakes

The term is not just used for the new file layout, but also the new cli around it. Flakes try to go after more "purity". For example with flakes the inputs (read where to download sources) and replaces channels by it.

One of the Benefit is that you get a flake.lock file in which the sources are locked via various ways (git commit, hash, etc). Beforehand channels where handled system wide and so developers had different versions again ...
My suggestion use flakes and therefor avoid fetch commands and registry syntax with <nixpkgs> (a registry is basically just a naming system (dns) and i think <nixpkgs> would just point to your local channel and the end of the chain)

new cli

As mentioned before with the flakes there also comes a new cli, mostly seperate tools new are part of nix

Old	New
nix-shell	nix shell
nix-store	nix store
...	...

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