Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for.
I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process.
I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS.
I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm).
But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix.
My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps).
Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.
I am running nix darwin and its a dream.
Don’t have any issues and things just work.
Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it.
Comments
Nix is downright awful on MacOS, even with the DetSys installer. Almost worse than Homebrew.
If you ever sit down to play with a native NixOS install, the difference in functionality is night-and-day.
Care to elaborate on what you've found most painful? Since `nix-darwin` is anything but officially supported, I am expecting trouble, but it would be nice to know if there are specific things I should look out for.
I'd love to use NixOS itself, of course, but it's not a native option on this machine due to the missing M4 support in Asahi. For now, I'm trying to see how much package/configuration management discipline I can reclaim on macOS, and familiarize myself with Nix in the process.
I could have just used a set of Ansible scripts and Homebrew, but that didn't seem quite as interesting as trying Nix out.
Not sure what issues they are facing but I use Nix flakes to manage my command line and UNIX env for two Macs, a Linux desktop running NixOS, a Windows WSL environment and two Linux home servers using NixOS.
I used to use a dot file manager (home grown and later yadm).
But once I got over the learning curve I much prefer using Nix.
My machines are now effectively immutable and I wipe them without worrying I will lose anything. Can still have machine or role specific configs (e.g. one of the Linux servers is my firewall, so it has no desktop environment or GUI apps).
Btw, you should Ghostty a try too. I was a long term Alacritty and WezTerm user, but Ghostty in 1.0 form already replaced everything I used those for, and has better native platform integration.
I am running nix darwin and its a dream. Don’t have any issues and things just work. Setting everything up just the way I like it took ages but thats because I wanted to play with it.
I use most of the same configuration on nixos too