Nix can manage Homebrew (via nix-darwin) too! home-manager works great too. Re: flakes, IMO, don't worry about them too much, Nix is complicated as it is. IME

Nix can manage Homebrew (via nix-darwin) too! home-manager works great too. Re: flakes, IMO, don't worry about them too much, Nix is complicated as it is. IME while the package selection is indeed huge it does happen the odd package is missing or temporarily broken. In that case, I just use Homebrew via nix-darwin. [edit]: okay, maybe do learn about Flakes, I've read parent's comment and got the part about helping with cross-platform stuff, plus Flakes are the future. But you might not need those features right away, people have been happily using Nix for years without them.