Using Nix on macOS
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Using Nix on macOS
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Re: Using Nix on macOS
#2Christ that's a lot of work, just to start working on work. I really want to like Nix, but the UX is frankly offputting. I really hope it improves to the point that it can be mindlessly installed.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#3That seems like a hell of a lot more work than just using Home-Manager and flakes. Flakes add a lot of boilerplate, but this seems excessive in comparison. And Home-Manager is quite easy.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#4This post focused solely on the Nix package manager and Nix packages - for anyone that uses MacOS but is interesting in trying NixOS (or using it within a VM in MacOS), I definitely recommend Mitchell Hashimoto's NixOS repo: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config
Honestly, doing that may be easier and a better option than using Nix packages in MacOS.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#5There is absolutely no way I can recommend using this at work. Nix is way too complicated. Its already bad enough being the git goto person. Nix is so complicated it somehow makes git look simple.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#6The best way to use Nix in MacOS is through qemu and utm in my opinion.
Then again, I don't like much about macs except the touchpad and macOS annoys me.
So this advice might not hold as true if you actually like OSX. Maybe checkout:
https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin
I'd also advice using flakes to simplify a lot of this.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#7Christ that's a lot of work, just to start working on work. I really want to like Nix, but the UX is frankly offputting. I really hope it improves to the point that it can be mindlessly installed.
I wouldn’t take this one blog post as gospel about how to use Nix.
I’m not denying that it’s complicated, but doing declarative package management is not the only way to dip your toes into Nix. You can use it pretty much as a conventional package manager with none of the upsides of declarative package management (but none of the complexity either).
On the surface level for people migrating from existing package managers, nix-env is approximately as complicated as something like pacman. You just need the command for installing, removing and updating (well, the 2 commands for updating, but that’s the only extra complexity).
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#8Christ that's a lot of work, just to start working on work. I really want to like Nix, but the UX is frankly offputting. I really hope it improves to the point that it can be mindlessly installed.
> Christ that's a lot of work, just to start working on work.
If you already have a Nix based development environment, it's much less work and more reliable than patching something worse up with homebrew.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#9I hope Docker is not the final answer to reproducible and isolated processes because it’s a bit too complex and slow on anything other than Linux, IMO.
Linux virtualization almost became a mandatory feature of a modern OS because of it.
I wish there was something that would run on any POSIX, but that’s probably not enough ground to cover complete reproduction.
Re: Using Nix on macOS
#10There is absolutely no way I can recommend using this at work. Nix is way too complicated. Its already bad enough being the git goto person. Nix is so complicated it somehow makes git look simple.
I completely disagree. It took me a while to work through the peculiarities of NixOS and get my OS setup, but the benefits are immense now that I'm using it. And I'm using it as a daily driver at a large tech company developing and maintaining mission critical systems.
It's really no different from Vim in this respect. Most people will bounce off due to the learning curve, but once you get past it, the benefits are too great to go back to a more crude system. In fact it was easier to learn and setup than Vim for me.