My Experience with Nix on OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#11

Post by hk__2 » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

_query wrote: post #8

ris wrote: post #5

I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily. If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

Good suggestion. Looks like travis already has an OS X build environment[0]. So technically it should be doable :) [0]: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/osx-ci-environment/

Yes Travis CI supports OS X and we used it for a while for Homebrew.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#12

Post by rokgarbas » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

defiancedigital wrote: post #2

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

a redesign of nix command line is on the way. so thins should get easier.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#13

Post by hk__2 » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

nikolay wrote: post #9

mitchty wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're patterned after rpm generally.

Which is a poor choice! Picking yum or apt as the model would have been a saner choice! I feel the same way dealing with Arch Linux - being different (read "weird") isn't always better!

> being different (read "weird") isn't always better!

To go further, being different is almost always a bad idea. People are used to how current stuff works; you need a really good reason not to provide the same interface.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#14

Post by rokgarbas » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

ris wrote: post #5

I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily. If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

the major reason for poor package support is low number of osx users (hydra - nix build farm - builds binaries also for osx).

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#15

Post by aeosynth » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#16

Post by frio » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

How would you run Atom on a Linux desktop without X11? Honest question; I didn't think Wayland/Weston were far enough along yet...

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#17

Post by kevincox » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

I've never used Nix for OS X, but I can confirm that the UI can definitely use some work, and the proposed changed which are in the pipe look fantastic.

But, comparing Nix on the simple operations is like reviewing a sports car after only driving it in a school zone. There is so much more that Nix provides that homebrew doesn't even come close to.

Nix has made managing of my servers way easier then anything I have tried before and I have no intentions of changing away any time soon.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#18

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

[deleted]

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#19

Post by vetinari » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

frio wrote: post #16

aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

How would you run Atom on a Linux desktop without X11? Honest question; I didn't think Wayland/Weston were far enough along yet...

He probably already had X11 installed and Nix was downloading duplicate libs.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#20

Post by cm3 » Mon, May 30, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

frio wrote: post #16

aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

How would you run Atom on a Linux desktop without X11? Honest question; I didn't think Wayland/Weston were far enough along yet...

Wayland and Weston work and there's also non-Weston compositors (window managers) like sway, kwin, gnome and more that actually work decently enough with Xwayland integration for running legacy (X11) apps.