- 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.
- mac-arm-support has just happened in Nix, with comments like "neovim does not work on m1" 2 weeks ago ( https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/95903#issuecomment-8... ). it works just fine in homebrew.
- 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.)