Re:macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
by pxc on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @10:01PM
(#27840718)
Fwiw, all of those except rolldice are in Nixpkgs, and you can also use Nix on top of any Linux distribution, separate from the base system, just like you use brew separate from the base system on macOS. Nix on top of Ubuntu, for example, would support all those packages. You won't like the CLI though
PS: Debian has > 3x as many packages as Arch[1]. It would surprise me very much if that was just a matter of things being more split up in Debian, or Debian's higher count of virtual packages. When people talk about Arch's great selection of packages, they're including the AUR, which is actually massive. Imo it makes more sense, then, to include the AUR in little tests like this.
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Re:macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
by heavyset_go on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:59PM
(#27838950)
The AUR[1] has rolldice, Android Studio, tealdeer, Heroku, Sublime Text, Slack and Postman.
Re:macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
by handrous on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @10:20PM
(#27840805)
Ah, I just searched the default repos. Thanks for the clarification, I missed AUR.
Re:macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
by smoldesu on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @12:52PM
(#27835218)
Default repos don't seem to carry a lot of those (no big surprise), but the AUR seems happy to serve them. All of the apps you listed are available there, presumably because it would be a bad idea to force people to build things from the primary repos. It's honestly a nice distinction, considering one of the main complaints I've heard from Homebrew users is that it's painful having binaries and build scripts mixed in.
Arch does much better, but a quick search of ones I guessed might be missing turned up the following missing, from what I have installed on my Mac:
- rolldice
- android studio (package name android-studio in homebrew)
- tealdeer
- heroku (these are the Heroku command line tools)
- sublime text (package name: sublime)
- postman
- slack
Maybe you can add other repos to get them on there, but I usually just guess the package name and get what I want. I don't think I have a single thing on my Mac, as far as software I directly use (not project dependencies), that I didn't install with Homebrew, aside from first-party Apple software (Pages, Numbers, Safari, Xcode, Mail, and so on). And that's not bringing up all the Mac-only software I've installed with it, which obviously wouldn't be fair.
I haven't added a single extra repo. That's just with the defaults. You used to have to do a one-time invocation to enable binary-only packages (mostly closed-source stuff) and then use a different keyword for operating with them, but that's no longer the case and hasn't been for IIRC at least a year—it's all transparent. "brew install [guess at package name]" works almost every time I need it, and a "brew search" finds the rare failures. I basically never need to open a browser to find & download software, and it's all up-to-date, and it's all totally separate from my base system so is extremely unlikely to ruin my morning because I ran a blanket update-everything-to-latest and didn't pay enough attention.