this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Nix / NixOS

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Convince me to switch (Mac M2, Homebrew) (lemmy.management)
submitted 1 year ago by hawkwind@lemmy.management to c/nix@programming.dev
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Disclaimer. I'm doing it anyway.

Long time hacker, and ambi-os user. Latest sexyness is my new macbook. After getting everything setup the way I want it, I start seeing buzz for Nix and got excited, but also bummed out that I didn't start from scratch.

I like new stuff, figuring it out and solving problems, but I also hate broken and unstable stuff. Doubly so when you go to use something you spent time setting up and it fails. Triply on having to switch your daily driver or setup any new system with all of your crazy custom setup.

  • How much pain will I suffer trying to replace brew with nixpkg?
  • Currently I use podman to build containers, should i switch to nix?
  • I use whatever virtual environment is appropriate for the task. Venv, etc. Seems like nix can do a better job?
  • What's the experience like with VSCode?

I am most excited at the prospect of using home-manager. The 'idea' of portability for my profile is pretty nice. I'd like to see it work across osx/win/linux and all the things be the same up to my browser and maybe some other cross-platform common things.

Don't roast me for not being hyper-specific here. I am not an uber-dev. I'd say I lean more into security and dev-ops. Happy to elaborate on anything.

I really want to hear others' experiences. I see the upside and, like I said, I'm going to take on the challenge anyway, but will I end up regretting it?

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[–] johnhamelink@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’m about 20 hours or so into my nix journey, with a similar background to OP. I’ve so-far moved to flakes, implemented a basic config for Darwin based on https://github.com/MatthiasBenaets/nixos-config

I’ve built a pkg override for emacs-overlay but I haven’t managed to keep it in scope since moving to flakes. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

For a specific project, I’ve implemented a new flake which uses https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv to set it up automatically when I cd into the project. Then (I’m especially happy about this), I’ve managed to get rootless podman working nicely in this setup, hopefully producing a low-maintenance yet cross compatible dev environment for Mac and Linux.

I love the fact that I can add all my homebrew taps, casks and brews into nix right away so that I can replace them one by one.

The beauty of all of this is you can use as much or as little nix as I like. For my server, I plan on running k3d first, then moving configuration piece by piece into nix as I learn & grow.

Hope that’s helpful :)