I did this for a while but MacOS updates broke Nix often enough that I usually would spent some time every week reinstalling it. I still use Nix for dev environments because it is great but Nix still breaks sometimes.

I also really wanted to like the declarative homebrew configuration but it also often didn’t work as expected for some configurations and had a lot of leaky abstractions that straight up just broke sometimes.

If I ever go back to managing my Mac with nix I would probably just do a home-manager setup and just install most of the applications imperatively.

Given this was using an intel based machine around the time when the switch to arm came so a lot of breakage also stemmed from that.

I still use nix to handle my homelab.

My setup up on my Mac is as follows:

- Orbstack

- NixOS machine run in orbstack

- My whole dev environment is run from this container and is very transportable

- GUI apps are installed on my Mac using the App Store or homebrew etc. but I try to reduce the amount of installed applications

- if I have to install something that I don’t want to install but have to, I try to do it in a UTM machine.

Try dra[1] and a simple shell script in your dotfiles that installs / updates everything in

  $HOME/bin

1: https://github.com/devmatteini/dra

I found the Brewfile and a little `setup.sh` to be more than sufficient for getting a new Mac setup.