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NixOS on M1

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51–60 of 71 posts

Re: NixOS on M1

#51
post #48

I have been using this repo as my daily driver for a month: * The author is quite responsive to personal messages or issues / pull requests. * The people who fork it and change a thing or two are champions, they play with adding rust compilation to the kernel, suspend, gpu drivers all before it is added to this repo. * Once you get to just NixOS, and you tweak your editor, battery monitor, etc. It is pretty hard to s…

Do you run Nix on the macOS side? How would you summarize your experience? Is it worth investing time/effort into it, considering you're also using NixOS?

You might as well also run Nix on macOS as well and extract out the common parts of your config (selection of CLI software, at least), right? I'd do that even if macOS was just a seldom-used 'backup OS'.

Re: NixOS on M1

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your account is 1 day old, and your question makes total sense to me too. So, welcome, glad to have you here of course. The answer is a commented "tldr" is widely used on news.ycombinator.com, and, as comments below say, it's become a conventional courtesy: people tend to scan comments for tldrs, in order to possibly avoid digressing into commonly (but not always) long winded posts.

FWIW I’ve been around for ages and I routinely browse the comments to get signal on whether or not the linked content is worthwhile.

yep same here: have been here since before it started, and the new person didn't realize such.

Re: NixOS on M1

#53
post #9

I tried that last week, and for me the dealbreaker was the touchpad... It may not really important for other people but not being able to use the f keys directly on the laptop is annoying....

I assume you mean the touchbar. The physical function keys work just fine on my m2-air running linux.

Re: NixOS on M1

#54

I've been using this on my m2 Air since July and I'm quite happy with it. If you are already comfortable with nixos then you'll find everything here quite straight forward.

A bit more details. I upgraded last week to enable the GPU driver (its just a nix config flag). The GPU driver works quite well given that its brand new and still quite experimental. I've had a few issues in early boot but once the system is up I've not seen any crashes yet.

I've been patching m1n1 to gain back the extra 64 pixels at the top of the screen in the notch area. I just saw a patch go by a few days ago to add a kernel flag to enable this so I need to switch over to that.

Overall the work in this project to track the asahi changes in the nixos way is being done very well. My system feels just like my other nixos systems.

Re: NixOS on M1

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually went the other way and released some extra features that only serve to make alt OSs easier and do nothing for macOS.

Hoping for a project osx86 to happen again but for ARM releases of Windows no doubt.

https://github.com/amarioguy/applesiliconwindowsproject/blob...

Re: NixOS on M1

#56
post #50

I have a MBP M1 and considered this, but instead I went with NixOS running in a VM inside macOS: https://xyno.space/post/nixos-utm-rosetta . This means I can use all the stuff that Linux-on-M1 currently doesn't support (e.g. webcam, power management, external displays) in macOS while having a NixOS instance available too. It should also -- at least theoretically — allow me to use Rosetta to run x86 Linux binaries. Ho…

Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`?

Can you "prove" that what you use NixOS for isn't overkill?

Everything I read about NixOS is how it's reproducible or something. I set up Cargo for Rust once and never thought about it again. Where does the need to reproduce toolchains come from?

Re: NixOS on M1

#57
post #48

I have been using this repo as my daily driver for a month: * The author is quite responsive to personal messages or issues / pull requests. * The people who fork it and change a thing or two are champions, they play with adding rust compilation to the kernel, suspend, gpu drivers all before it is added to this repo. * Once you get to just NixOS, and you tweak your editor, battery monitor, etc. It is pretty hard to s…

Do you run Nix on the macOS side? How would you summarize your experience? Is it worth investing time/effort into it, considering you're also using NixOS?

I do run nix on the macos side, for graphics apps like a browser I would not recommend. But for command line apps like interpreters, compilers and vim-like editors it is really useful imho.

Re: NixOS on M1

#58
post #50

I have a MBP M1 and considered this, but instead I went with NixOS running in a VM inside macOS: https://xyno.space/post/nixos-utm-rosetta . This means I can use all the stuff that Linux-on-M1 currently doesn't support (e.g. webcam, power management, external displays) in macOS while having a NixOS instance available too. It should also -- at least theoretically — allow me to use Rosetta to run x86 Linux binaries. Ho…

Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`? Can you "prove" that what you use NixOS for isn't overkill? Everything I read about NixOS is how it's reproducible or something. I set up Cargo for Rust once and never thought about it again. Where does the need to reproduce toolchains come from?

> Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`?

Sure. At work I needed access to the office VPN. I copied a snippet into a single configuration file and everything just worked. It installed the necessary executables, and set up the needed services including the config files for these services.

Re: NixOS on M1

#59
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`? Can you "prove" that what you use NixOS for isn't overkill? Everything I read about NixOS is how it's reproducible or something. I set up Cargo for Rust once and never thought about it again. Where does the need to reproduce toolchains come from?

> Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`? Sure. At work I needed access to the office VPN. I copied a snippet into a single configuration file and everything just worked. It installed the necessary executables, and set up the needed services including the config files for these services.

How is this different than installing Tunnelblick and pointing it to a .ovpn file (which I've done)?

Could you share that Nix VPN config file example please?

Re: NixOS on M1

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just grateful that Apple didn't totally lock down the bootloader on macOS devices, given the knowhow evident on iOS/iPadOS.

They actually went the other way and released some extra features that only serve to make alt OSs easier and do nothing for macOS.

That's inaccurate. The ability to run unsigned OSes while not affecting the safety of a signed OS is useful for beta versions of macOS past their due date, and most importantly, older versions of macOS that Apple no longer validate themselves.
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