> Hm. Using Nix looks interesting (I’m a fellow Mac user). Nix is very powerful; there's a steep learning curve the more of its ecosystem you use. If "declarat

> Hm. Using Nix looks interesting (I’m a fellow Mac user). Nix is very powerful; there's a steep learning curve the more of its ecosystem you use. If "declarative", "generational", "immutable" are all words you like, it's worth looking into. It's one of the best ways to be able to get a consistent set of tools (and versions of) across macOS/Linux. > When you do that, do you also need to compile the applications during installation…? (E.g. stuff written in Rust/C/C++) My experience using Nixpkgs with macOS was that most stuff downloaded from the cache. I would run into a few cache-misses where Nix would fetch & compile the source. (e.g. KeePassXC .. although maybe it wasn't cached because other users would install programs like that from casks). > Do you need to edit the “recipes” a lot or do they generally Just Work? Mostly it works. The caveats: - I have run into a case where some test failed because of path length limits(?). I worked around that by skipping the test. - I'd guess the order of popularity of community usage is "NixOS > other Linux > macOS > other". Some packages might be able to work on macOS, but either have metadata marked as linux-only, or don't take care of (maybe) macOS specific needs. (e.g. It's been fixed, and the workaround wasn't difficult before that, but I'd run into this https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/56348 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/56348). - Nix is weird; so, sometimes when it's not doing what you want, it can be difficult to figure out what it is you have to do. (So, you can fall-back and use homebrew or whatever).