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.

They do have and apparently the scale of the repo is actively breaking things: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-core-team-update-2025-...