I recently switched back to Homebrew from Nix, and the three big factors in that switch are:

- Brew seems to have better support for the packages it has, compared to Nix where it seems a percentage of packages are not as well maintained,

- Better Mac support; some Nix packages have features disabled on macOS, I think just because the maintainers of this packages don’t have a Mac for testing,

- Better UX.

Obviously I miss the reproducibility of Nix environments and the ability to easily create my own flakes with specific packages, but on the balance, Brew has won me back. (I still like Nix, and FWIW we use Nix at work.)

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commandersaki an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I was interested in Nix because it could automate setup and configuration of macOS features. But all it does is usually run defaults or some intermediatary. In the end I stuck with brew and wrote an idempotent setupmac() function in my bash_profile (I use bash 5) with the aid of chatgpt since it knows all the cool defaults commands, and it’s pretty much solved setting up a new account or mac (alongside a Brewfile I maintain in my dotfiles). I don’t need any of those highfalutin tools.

	▲	klodolph 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I am, like, two minutes away from getting my configuration back on a fresh Mac or Linux system without Nix, so configuration management is just irrelevant to me. I am evaluating it as a package manager and a way to setup development environments.

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Fethbita 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use nix-darwin and also manage my homebrew packages with it. Maybe you can take a look at that.

May I ask for what do you use it at work? I have a few places I think nix might suit but I can’t really put my finger on it.

	▲	klodolph an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not sure what I would get out of nix-Darwin. It looks like it does not solve any of the problems I am trying to solve? I don’t need or want configuration management on my personal systems, except for the web servers, which I manage using Terraform and Ansible (I am happy with these). We use Nix at work for all sorts of stuff. Binaries run in production from Nix paths. Software we build has dependencies in Nix. People on workstations run commands from Nix paths. The OS is not Nix, but the Nix package manager looks like it’s on its way to consuming most of our dependencies. It is not used for building or deploying our code, though.

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mikemcquaid 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very glad to hear this, thanks for posting.