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Just got started and I'm already fascinated with generations and rolling back. How difficult is it to use as a complete replacement for Homebrew? Am I likely t

Just got started and I'm already fascinated with generations and rolling back. How difficult is it to use as a complete replacement for Homebrew? Am I likely to find most of the packages provided by Homebrew?

danieldk 7y ago
It's fairly realistic. On my Mac, I only use Homebrew for casks. I have everything else installed through Nix. One of the nicest things is that I have nearly completely overridden macOS' outdated utilities with a GNU userland (without any annoying g- prefix). I also define most of my user configuration with home-manager (both on Mac, NixOS, and work's Ubuntu servers). On a new machine I just run nix run nixpkgs.home-manager home-manager switch My home-manager configuration: https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  That's awesome. Just finished the video on home manager which seems very useful. Your videos being directed at co-workers actually serves to highlight the usefulness of this tool. "Oh, you're missing dependency x, y and z? Here, just copy and paste this nix command to get my Nix environment." Then you can immediately continue discussing more productive things. I'm curious about generations. If you roll back to a previous generation and then continue to modify that, will the generation be overwritten? If not, is there a way to track only the history of generations that contribute a change to their current generation? Also, I saw you run NixOS in a droplet. Do you have any experience running it locally as a desktop environment? I'm curious how mature it is as a full blown Linux Desktop.
  - burke 7y ago
    Generations are linear, so if you are on 6, roll back to 3, and make a new change (I'm 90% sure) it will create 7. I've used NixOS a liiiiitle bit on a laptop but not enough to really get into it. We're toying with the idea of exploring supporting NixOS as a primary local development environment (and a host for cloud-based development environments) but there's lot of work to do to make that work well.

danieldk 7y ago

It's fairly realistic. On my Mac, I only use Homebrew for casks. I have everything else installed through Nix. One of the nicest things is that I have nearly completely overridden macOS' outdated utilities with a GNU userland (without any annoying g- prefix). I also define most of my user configuration with home-manager (both on Mac, NixOS, and work's Ubuntu servers). On a new machine I just run nix run nixpkgs.home-manager home-manager switch My home-manager configuration: https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home

ShamelessC 7y ago
That's awesome. Just finished the video on home manager which seems very useful. Your videos being directed at co-workers actually serves to highlight the usefulness of this tool. "Oh, you're missing dependency x, y and z? Here, just copy and paste this nix command to get my Nix environment." Then you can immediately continue discussing more productive things. I'm curious about generations. If you roll back to a previous generation and then continue to modify that, will the generation be overwritten? If not, is there a way to track only the history of generations that contribute a change to their current generation? Also, I saw you run NixOS in a droplet. Do you have any experience running it locally as a desktop environment? I'm curious how mature it is as a full blown Linux Desktop.
- burke 7y ago
  Generations are linear, so if you are on 6, roll back to 3, and make a new change (I'm 90% sure) it will create 7. I've used NixOS a liiiiitle bit on a laptop but not enough to really get into it. We're toying with the idea of exploring supporting NixOS as a primary local development environment (and a host for cloud-based development environments) but there's lot of work to do to make that work well.