Some unsolicited, anecdotal advice I hope will be appreciated -
After several years of perennial macOS environment hell (part of which was spent working in a much more research-oriented environment - e.g. lots of ancient HPC packages, etc.), I made the jump to just using Nix on macOS [0]. Takes a little bit of learning (realistically just a couple hours to get productive IME - just enough to get acquainted with nix-shell [1] and build some configs). After a few months, I had the thought to look at what I still used brew for and realized I could just move to Nix completely - and remove Brew. I back up all my nix configs to a git repo, just in case - and whenever I switch to a new machine, or "brick" my current one - I just reinstall nix, pull in my configs, and I'm good to go - takes 5 minutes (a conservative estimate tbh). The only caveat is to just check the community [2] before upgrading to the next macOS version to make sure any issues have been ironed out. In the early days of macOS support, it was a bit finnicky between updates - I haven't had any issues for the last couple years that weren't my fault (for example, booting into recovery mode and accidentally deleting the nix store APFS volume - even then, all I had to do was reinstall nix and pull my configs).
It is so nice to just "declare" I want to use and just...use it. Want to try out ripgrep for something?
`nix-shell -p ripgrep`
Not what you want? just exit the shell. Too much unused crap taking up space in your Nix store? `nix-collect-garbage`.
There's even darwin-nix [3] as a sort-of "nixos-for-macos" - I started using it recently, mostly for managing macOS settings declaratively, and it's great - but honestly 99% of the usefulness I get on macOS from Nix is just using the package manager!
I've used Nix with Nix-Darwin on my macOS machines for a couple years now. The primary benefit is that when I get a new macOS machine, it's only three steps to having ALL my apps, configurations, etc. exactly as they were before:
1. Download Nix installer (I prefer the one by Determinate Systems)
2. Clone my Nix configs (public, so I don't even need secrets like keys yet)
3. Run `make`
I then wait around 15 minutes or so (mostly network time) and I'm good to go.
ONE BIG RECOMMENDATION: I don't like using nix-darwin to manage graphical apps directly. It's a bit awkward. But, you can use nix-darwin to declaratively manage `homebrew`, so I still get my graphical apps from Homebrew. The linked article seems to suggest ditching homebrew entirely but I found its best as a mix of both worlds with Nix being the source of truth to manage everything else, including brew.
You can find my configurations on GitHub but note that if you're new to Nix you would do better finding a simpler starting point: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config (these are shared Nix configurations between macOS, Linux, and WSL on Windows).
Not the person you're asking, but I use nix on my MacBook and ditched brew after a few weeks. The main draw for me was that I was already using home-manager on NixOS, and being able to share the same config on macOS was pretty compelling. I had to sprinkle a couple conditionals in the home-manager config to account for things that are linux-only, but it was pretty painless.
For my own use case, I install a few things "globally" in my home-manager config (neovim, vscode, fish shell, etc.). Then each of my projects gets its own flake with a devShell, and I use nix-direnv to bring things into the PATH when I cd into the project directory. I also use `nix shell` a fair bit if I just want to run something in a one-off shell session.
You can also use nix profiles if you're looking for a more brew-like experience, but I never really mess with those. I figure if I want something to be persistently installed, it's better to just stuff it into my home-manager config so it will be there on all my machines.
On the whole, I much prefer nix to brew. I'd still recommend brew to people that don't want to bother with learning nix, but if you're already running NixOS I'd say go for it.
On the contrary, I find it super helpful to set up my workstation. I don’t use any other package manager on macOS these days, everything is Nix, fully declarative with a small script that basically does `nix-env --install` (but with the flags to replace my current environment wholly, and with some helpers around showing what changed). I can then just sync my config between my machines and run my script and get identical setups on every machine I use, and I can update all of my packages at once just by running `nix channel --update` followed by invoking my script again.
And there’s a bunch of utilities I use rarely so I don’t even keep them installed, since I know I can just `nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello` if I ever want to run them.
And then for a work project I set up a custom derivation that I can use when I need to run the occasional scripts that require the custom ruby and python environment, so I can just run e.g. `nix run nixpkgs.my.env -c pod install`. This way I’m not even polluting my global environment with this stuff the way the work scripts expect. And I’m currently working on formalizing this into Nix derivations in the work repo directly (in an attempt to convince my coworkers that we should all use Nix).
Reproducible builds are super appealing: "Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they are reproducible and don't have undeclared dependencies, so if a package works on one machine, it will also work on another."
As is the focus on reliability: "Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package cannot break other packages. It allows you to roll back to previous versions, and ensures that no package is in an inconsistent state during an upgrade."
I've used it as my primary package manager on macOS for six months, but ended up dropping it.
My main reasons -
* Nix doesn't have support for GUI apps like homebrew cask does - which meant I couldn't drop homebrew anyway.
* The nix ecosystem forums suggest using nix-shell for managing packages for other languages, eg. python, java - but it's been really difficult to convince team members to use nix instead of pyenv, conda, gradle etc
I've been using nix on macOS as my primary package manager for years. Really love it! Specifically nix-shell is a blessing a you can quickly try out things without worrying about breaking some other packages on the system.
Initially we've only used nix for development at my company, but now we're also running most of our servers with NixOS. This allows us to use our dev package definitions in production, so our dependencies are always in sync between dev and prod. I've written a blog post about all the advantages we get with nix in our framework IHP a while ago, if you're curious, check it out: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/blog/2020-07-22-why-ihp-is-...
If you're using an older mac and have troubles with installing nix, try out the new installer in this GH issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4289 (the command is in the "Try it out" section). It's already merged, but not released yet. So far this has solved all the issues on older macs for me.
Also check out https://nix.dev/ which has many great resources to get started :)
Nix was the only thing holding my sanity together when I was using Mac last. Maybe it was just the Apple Silicon transition, but Homebrew did not have parity with it's x86 version which led to wildly complicated scripts just to get dev environments arranged similarly. Not the sort of thing you want to deal with regularly.
Nix makes my dev life on MacOS so much more manageable. The "dirty" feeling has, for the most part, gone away. I'm also able to easily share common config between other machines I use.
Nix (specifically nix package manager on MacOS) sits in a weird spot where it is absolutely indispensable for me personally but I am absolutely hesitant to recommend it to others without extreme caveats. I really wish the UX of it were much better, which ideally then would lead to higher adoption and less frequent 'osx-isms'.
It (Nix) provides a much more pleasant experience on Linux/NixOS itself.
On OS X, like right now, after switching to El Capitan, you begin to see the disadvantages.
In fact any major change in some packages, require a lot of digging around and most of the time, the solutions are not at all obvious, and mostly undocumented properly.
Also, when you do find a workaround, you will still have to compromise and compile everything from source, waiting for the binary cache (hosted by the project) to catch-up.
The flexibility, and cross-platform nature of Nix, is something that's difficult to resist though (regardless of the philosophy of the project).
Nix is very cool, and I encourage anyone to at least install nix on their machine and try it out. I started using it on my Mac, mostly to set up a Haskell environment, which at the time meant quicker builds than using other tools, due to the binary cache.
I now use it for python, scala, emacs and basically wherever else I can get away with not using Homebrew. I share the config [1] between my work and personal machine. This works really well: it's just a git pull, and a `nix-env -iA nixpkgs.devEnv` and my environment is updated (and I can easily roll back to the previous state if something goes wrong). It does take a lot of up-front investment, learning a new language and paradigm, but once things are working they tend to stay working.
I try it every few months because I _really_ want it to work locally. Nix itself works pretty well, and most of the packages work well, but there's just enough brokenness in important utilities to keep me going back to brew for now.
It's certainly possible to mix them, and use nix for most things with brew as a crutch until nix packages get better, but I already have the App Store, stack, cargo, pip, gem, and npm trying to manage packages on my system, and I really don't want to add a brew replacement until it can be a complete replacement.
I remember how awesome it was to switch from Homebrew to Nix, noticeably the speed. But there is something off about Nix:
+ Installation process, especially on Mac: nix, and then home-manager. And I don't even mention flake. Right now I'm settled with a helpful script from https://nix.dev/, but I don't say I'm fully confident.
+ How to add an external package which is not in nixpkgs. I have to learn Nix and dig Nix docs and ask too many questions to figure this process. In the end it is awesome but I could feel the barrier for beginner.
+ Documentation. It's easy to get started with some popular packages but it's a pain to customize your own. I always find myself banging my head to dig the information I need.
So in conclusion, Nix is awesome to use if you invest time to learn the Nix expression language. Otherwise you have to stuck with the default packages provided by nixpkgs.
Yeah, I switched completely to nix after being frustrated with homebrew constantly breaking things (any time I installed something. (Usually involving libicu being replaced with a different version.) And then had to pick up homebrew again for a couple of things.
I _really_ like being able to drop into a shell with a few additional packages installed. But nix does have a learning curve and some rough edges. I found it tricky to use things like libraries outside of nix's build process. And there is a bit of an impedance mismatch when trying to use languages that have their own package management.
So I've got nix for a bunch of software, a couple of libraries in homebrew, and native package management for various languages (cargo, ghcup, lake, idris).
I also reluctantly installed agda via homebrew because I can't get it to build. (Haskell mostly works on M1).
Even better for getting started: Using nix as an additional package manager that won't fight with whatever pre-existing OS uses. My first exposure was using nix instead of homebrew on OSX.
i would just link you mine but this is a pseudonymous account; however:
most nix-darwin users i know have a darwin-configuration.nix that's nearly identical to the one the installer plops down for you, with the exception of more items under `environment.systemPackages`, and using nix-darwin solely as a declarative alternative to nix-env is totally viable
other than a few built-in service configurations and plist defaults, darwin-configuration.nix typically grows much as configuration.nix does on nixos. define or modify a couple packages here and there, shove them into `pkgs` by setting `nixpkgs.overlays`, etc etc. the ux is intentionally very similar to that of nixos
what this means is you can look at a lot of people's nixos config repos and get some idea of what you can do just as well with nix-darwin
i can, however, offer you my anecdote:
nix-darwin has let me completely forget that brew and macports exist, and even let me get away without installing xcode at all -- it's perfectly competent at “getting a suite of dev tools onto a macbook”, but what really sold me on it was just how straightforward adding a new package is:
that's an average of 32 lines to go from “obscure thing that literally nobody packages” to “bona fide part of my system”, and that includes meta blocks with homepage/description/etc, because i periodically try and get some of this stuff merged into mainline nixpkgs
the language itself is a little quirky and the evaluation model of the module system is somewhat fraught with fixed-point knot-tying fuckery, but between the process of packaging being so nice and brew/macports pissing me off, i found it easy to drink enough koolaid to get to grips with those aspects
i've been using nix-darwin and for almost exactly one year, and replaced all my linux installs with nixos, and i have not looked back whatsoever
I also prefer to put my Mac apps in ~/Applications (I thought I was the only one!). I was resistant with Nix defaults for this reason when I set up my newest Mac, but I still wanted all of the other benefits of Nix. Ultimately what persuaded me was that it was basically so trivial to remove Nix and anything it installs… that I actually did remove everything, multiple times, whenever I ran into bumps getting my Nix setup going in the right direction. I got to take the Nix happy path to avoid self-inflicted pain, with the reassurance that it’s far less intrusive than anything else I’ve accepted that installs system-wide.
I love Nix and NixOS personally... but it's been a tough sell at work, unfortunately.
Even with simple shell scripts... it's so easy to invoke programs with GNU extensions and later find they fail on a co-workers macos machine. And I often have a shell.nix sitting right there that defines the complete dependency closure; very frustrating to not be able to use it.
After several years of perennial macOS environment hell (part of which was spent working in a much more research-oriented environment - e.g. lots of ancient HPC packages, etc.), I made the jump to just using Nix on macOS [0]. Takes a little bit of learning (realistically just a couple hours to get productive IME - just enough to get acquainted with nix-shell [1] and build some configs). After a few months, I had the thought to look at what I still used brew for and realized I could just move to Nix completely - and remove Brew. I back up all my nix configs to a git repo, just in case - and whenever I switch to a new machine, or "brick" my current one - I just reinstall nix, pull in my configs, and I'm good to go - takes 5 minutes (a conservative estimate tbh). The only caveat is to just check the community [2] before upgrading to the next macOS version to make sure any issues have been ironed out. In the early days of macOS support, it was a bit finnicky between updates - I haven't had any issues for the last couple years that weren't my fault (for example, booting into recovery mode and accidentally deleting the nix store APFS volume - even then, all I had to do was reinstall nix and pull my configs).
It is so nice to just "declare" I want to use and just...use it. Want to try out ripgrep for something? `nix-shell -p ripgrep` Not what you want? just exit the shell. Too much unused crap taking up space in your Nix store? `nix-collect-garbage`.
There's even darwin-nix [3] as a sort-of "nixos-for-macos" - I started using it recently, mostly for managing macOS settings declaratively, and it's great - but honestly 99% of the usefulness I get on macOS from Nix is just using the package manager!
[0] https://nixos.org/download#nix-install-macos [1] https://nix.dev/tutorials/first-steps/declarative-shell [2] https://nixos.org/community/ [3] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin
reply