Trying to decide on whether to use Nix on my new Macbook… the idea of Nix always appeals to me, but I always get lost in all the decisions I need to make when setting it up. Do I wait for another release cycle and just go with Brew for now? 🤔
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I feel like I'm finally starting to get my head around it!
I've have managed to install nix, have a nix-darwin configuration installed using flakes, and am using home-manager to manage program-specific configuration. It's starting to look rather comfy!
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I now need to start figuring out how to use it for development though… 😳
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If you haven't already seen it, do check out nix.dev ; there has been a bunch of documentation effort recently. (I'm not using Nix, but I was also looking into it.)
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Any reason why you decided not to use it?
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I think the decisions that you need to make won’t necessarily change with more releases, but I’ve been using nix/NixOS for the last 4 years and wont be switching back to OS X/homebrew. I’ve had great experiences of upgrading packages without breakage and that’s a great feeling!
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I think the thing I've been concerned about is the nix command and flakes. Both seem really nice for usability, but still seem experimental and in state of flux, and not documented that well, so I'm not sure if it's really a good idea to give them a go yet 😅
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Hmm, seems like things seem to be moving towards flakes at least, but yeah it does seem to be a bit in flux, which is why I was wondering whether to hold off. But yeah I'm giving it a go – will see how bad it ends up going!
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I’ve settled on using Homebrew for the environment (instead of nix-env), and Nix for release builds, so that they are repeatable and I can archive everything needed. I’m working with Rust and Bevy.
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