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."
- when installing it on a new mac, you need to use the "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" switch, which does not inspire confidence (and yes, the documentation points out that on mac computers with T2 chip this still creates an encrypted volume or something, the point is, when installing homebrew i do not have to tell it to do something unencrypted)
- sometimes you get the feeling that nix-on-mac is less important than nixos. like, the whole problem with that "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" thing is because nix wants to live in the "/nix" directory, and apple does not like that. you could install nix into an another directory and have no apple-problems, but the rest of the nix-ecosystem standardized on "/nix", so if you do that, you get no binary packages etc. with homebrew, you get a package-manager that is focused on macos, it does things the way that makes it easy to use on macos.
still, the advantages of Nix are very impressive, and i'll keep looking at it, i just wanted to balance out all the overly positive switch-to-git articles a little :-)
(NOTE: all this info is from following nix-related topics for a couple months. i did not install nix on mac yet.)
A recent HN thread on NixOS had comments that said that NixOS seems better supported than regular Nix, or at least it was generally easier to find documentation in the form of blog posts and such for the NixOS commands.
I've been ruminating on making the switch to nix, you might already be familiar with it, but if not, here's an article I came across:
https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/macos-nix-setup/
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."
From https://nixos.org