Indeed.

As soon as lanzaboote works with stable, I'll go back to stable (but I think that is not the case yet, sadly).

Lowkey plug for lanzaboote though. Getting secure boot working went pretty well for me thanks to it.

There's still the data migration issue. If you follow unstable all the time, an app may update its data files or databases at startup. Then, you can still roll back the binaries, but they'll just refuse to work (best case) or corrupt the unknown data format (worst case).

Following up on this, has anyone tried this and seen how well it works in practice?

“ Speedify, a proprietary VPN which allows combining multiple internet connections (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Ethernet, Starlink, Satellite, and more) to improve the stability, speed, and security of online experiences. Available as services.speedify.”

I started playing with nix few months ago. Youtube videos from Vimjoyer helped a lot. On top of that Claude Code is very good at understanding/explaining/updating config.

Regarding features: so far for my home setup (few vms on proxmox) I only needed flakes. They age good at organizing multihost config.

But besides it it works smoothly. And I constantly have thought “wait, why we didn’t always do it this way?”

This past month, I have spent a decent amount of hours (7+) trying to setup nix on my mac with nix-darwin, and failed.

Most tutorial out there encourage you to download someone else's configuration to get going. I don't want to do that. I want to understand at its core how this thing works.

I've read the official nix language documentation, watched YouTube tutorials, read 3rd party tutorials, and still couldn't get going with a simple configuration that would install a few packages.

The nix language is also really unpalatable to me. But I could deal with that if the examples out there showed a consistent way of doing things – that's not the case. It seems one same thing can be done many different ways – but I want to know and do it the right way. I would generally turn myself to the official best practices documentation, except nix' is very short and doesn't help much.

I really want to use nix. There's no question about its advantages. But nix just won't let me (or maybe I'm too old to learn new things).

That being said, I'll probably give it another try this month...

(disclaimer: self-plug)

I similarly found `nix flake update` frustrating for a while, especially when using unstable Nixpkgs. I wrote a tool called `npc` that basically solved the problem for me by letting me bisect whatever Nixpkgs channel(s) I have in my flake inputs: https://github.com/samestep/npc

I'm not conflicted. Nothing compares to nix. I've been using it on macOS, for Linux hosts, for years now, and it's been incredibly rock solid. I stopped using homebrew years ago and I couldn't be happier about that.

> Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake update` too often as a result.

I find using a singular nixpkgs version is almost always a recipe for things breaking if you are on unstable. I usually end up juggling multiple nixpkg versions, for example you might want to pin the input to nix-darwin separately.

This is squarely a nixpkgs problem. It's the largest most active package repository known to man. I am pretty sure GitHub has special-cased infrastructure just for it to even function. Things are much more stable in release branches. If that causes you pain because you want the latest and greatest, it's worth considering that you'd experience the same problem with other package repositories (e.g. Debian), and then asking yourself what it is you are actually trying to accomplish. There's a reason they call it unstable.

> but if you squint and reason that mise and nix solve the same issue, why not use the less opinionated, easier to reason about mise?

If mise works for you then great, use it. When I squint and reason, they do not solve the same issue. I don't know how you come to the same conclusion either. Why are you using nix-darwin at all? What is the overlap between nix-darwin and mise? I don't see it.

If all you want is dev environments, I recommend flox.

At the end of the day I'll continue using nix, and especially nix-darwin, _solely_ because it let me set up a new machine in under 5 minutes and hit the ground running. Nothing else compares.

I have both Nixos and Macs so I appreciate I can control everything through a single repo. I have a single flake with nixosConfigurations, darwinConfigurations and home manager pointing to different nixpkgs and other weird stuff such as jovian for my gaming pc and a special repo for my rpi5.

> period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync

What do you mean? Those should be fairly independent in practice.

I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you're already getting some of on OSX. The reason I'm going to use it on OSX again is mostly to get consistent HOME configuration and tooling across all of my devices. I'll manage my OSX home dir and tools with the exact same file across multiple computers.