Are flakes necessary for that? I would think you could install x86_64 binaries manually by setting `system`, even on the 2.3 branch. It seems I can do the rever

Are flakes necessary for that? I would think you could install x86_64 binaries manually by setting `system`, even on the 2.3 branch. It seems I can do the reverse thing: $ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hello --argstr system aarch64-darwin $ file $(which hello) /Users/ian/.nix-profile/bin/hello: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64 But maybe you just mean that it does this automatically? That's neat, if so. And I would expect this to be a lot more annoying within a default.nix file, having to keep track of two different nixpkgs imports.