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M1 dev setup using a NixOS virtual machine
- smoldesu 4y ago> A big downside of committing to “the Nix way” at this point in time is that fixing broken stuff might need learning the language and digging through docs and issues which are not always clear or complete. If they mean broken packages, then yeah; there's probably only a few dozen serious aarch64 users on NixOS, and only a handful of them probably end up reporting package issues. You'll probably need to fix some things manually, in the end. As for fixing cruft/breakage, Nix' generation concept helps mitigate update-related disaster. If you've got devenvs separated into flakes/profiles, you can roll them back on a rebuild-by-rebuild basis, pretty much ensuring you'll never be left with an unusable system. Obviously, this only extends to NixOS in a VM to a limited extent, but still useful to have. I guess my real question is... why? If you're going to go through all of this trouble just to resort to a VM, why wouldn't you install Nix natively on MacOS and then use containers as-needed? Having an always-on VM for development seems like such a chore to me, especially on MacOS...