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> but I cannot live without NixOS,

Just to double check: nix on Darwin isn't good enough?




Nope. I tried it and hated the MacOS GUI. I like my window-manager config, and various other deep customizations. Also, MacOS updates kept breaking things.


macOS updates breaking things is one of the biggest frustrations I remember from regularly using macOS with Nix (and Homebrew, and a handful of third-party GUI apps, for that matter). The macOS GUI environment isn't for me, either.

Nix-Darwin (the module system that gives you some NixOS-like features with Nix on macOS) is nice, but macOS ultimately can't match the predictability and control one gets used to on NixOS. A system that updates in a non-uniform way, has limited configurability, and where the configuration of the system isn't given anywhere in a trackable, comprehensible form feels painfully chaotic in comparison.

(I can understand why Nix on Darwin (with or without Nix-Darwin) is a great fit for many, though. Having a 'normal', mainstream desktop underneath your still relatively predictable, explicit, reproducible dev tooling is awesome in a lot of ways.)




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