After a decade of homebrew, a few years ago I got tired of their very grumpy maintainers and switched to nix-darwin + home-manager. I've been overall fairly happy, and for tinkerers would recommend giving it a shot. Admittedly I bounced off my first try a year before that.

A few of my favorite parts, which I see less represented in this thread so far:

- I simultaneously jumped into nixos on several Linux machines (starting with a few Pis for experimentation), and maintaining all of my systems with a single flake and mostly shared code is a dream come true. - no more convoluted dotfile syncing, most of my scripts and aliases and bash config and binaries all sync together - cross-building linux from Darwin -- including integration tests in a vm -- works surprisingly well, this is mostly just nix but nix-darwin has helpers that make this easier - writing system services (launchd) on my Mac then converting them to a headless Linux machine (systemd) is generally very straightforward - prefixing my path with GNU coreutils works well and saves me from many e.g. `sed` quirks, I get expected behavior across OSes - this was always a sore spot in homebrew, either dealing with the `g` prefix on everything (eg `gsed`) or dealing with intermittent breakages when stuff depends on the BSD behavior - I was also able to put nix-darwin on my wife's MacBook and greatly simplify admin / maintenance tasks I do for her - finally, the nix crew is just thirsty for help and contributions, particularly the darwin crowd; I feel like my (minor, occasional) contributions are celebrated, differences of opinion are met with an open mind, it is in general a far departure from the relative hostility of homebrew - on the down side, I have spent far more of my limited time helping contribute to nixpkgs / nix-darwin / home-manager