M4 Mac mini's efficiency

Re:M4 Mac mini's efficiency by talldayo on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @06:03PM (#42120874)

Well, missing packages for one. Nix prides itself on having one of the most compete package catalogs of any Linux package manager, and on Mac it leaves quite a bit to be desired. A lot of functionality has to be hooked in via home-manager scripts that are a lot less stable than NixOS modules, and since your system isn't built/upgraded by Nix you can't write overlays for a lot of Mac software. If you only need the versioned Flake management then it might be an okay option, but I found myself pretty frustrated by it in places that aren't an issue on Linux. I can't comfortably use it as a Homebrew replacement.

Also, my Mac is 256gb which feels far too cramped for Nix. I'd really only recommend it if you're working with 512gb or more.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:M4 Mac mini's efficiency by koiueo on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @06:20PM (#42121050)

Yeah, I eventually realized that nix-darwin is only good for managing the list of homebrew casks.

home-manager works better than I'd expect. At least I don't have to spend time configuring vim, git and shell prompt.

But overall, Nix on MacOS feels like a hack, behaves like a hack... because it's essentially a hack...

I'm waiting for the first reports of Lenovo's t14s gen 6 with Snapdragon X Elite.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:M4 Mac mini's efficiency by pxc on Wednesday November 13, 2024 @04:34AM (#42124456)

> Yeah, I eventually realized that nix-darwin is only good for managing the list of homebrew casks.

If that's really all you use it for, and you already use Home Manager, the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin works fine in Home Manager with some small tweaks. I use that with a custom, per-user Homebrew prefix to keep Homebrew out of the way except for the task of installing casks.

[ Parent | on HN ]