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Doe nix work at all? Or is it just not actually functional on top of MacOS? I've tried a dozen times over the years and I've never gotten it working. Seriously

Doe nix work at all? Or is it just not actually functional on top of MacOS? I've tried a dozen times over the years and I've never gotten it working. Seriously, how is anything so hard to use still around after 20 years!

dindresto 4y ago
You might want to give the new installer by Determinate Systems a try: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer
- ziml77 4y ago
  I'm definitely going to give that a try. I had issues with the Bash script on macOS and was annoyed that it left me with a system that I had to manually clean up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
SkyMarshal 4y ago
Hard to answer your question without info on what the problem is, but lots of people use it on MacOS. Maybe ask about your problem on /r/nixos or https://discourse.nixos.org/ https://discourse.nixos.org/.
kaba0 4y ago
It absolutely works and is the best thing since sliced bread within package managers — many UNIX tools are just simply broken on Mac (not always on the packaging side), and in case of more niche tools it is simply not a priority.
striking 4y ago
I ship a development environment to a fleet of ~100 engineer laptops based on Nix. If it didn't work, I'd be out of a job
- thisismyswamp 4y ago
  Why would engineers need their environment shipped to them by a human?
  - striking 4y ago
    Technically they `git pull` it themselves, but the fact that it continues to work involves a human.
    - tmountain 4y ago
      Do they run NixOS or just use the package manager? What’s the host OS?
      - striking 4y ago
        They run macOS, pull a repo, run a setup script. They get a multi-user Nix install with a direnv integration that boots up project-local daemons. Think Postgres, Redis, and so on; those are all available, along with the Nix packages the env needs, while their current working directory is that of a project folder. Very few things live outside of the project, but the things that do are unfortunately stateful. We'll be solving that soon, too.
        earthling8118 4y ago
        Is the direnv integration custom or do you base it off of something? I use direnv extensively but I don't have it start any project daemons currently and I've been shipping scripts via devShell for managing them. I'd be very interested in this
        striking 4y ago
        We use nix-direnv mostly for the caching support and we use s6 as basically an init system but per project. Besides that it's all custom. We're looking to replace s6 with our own supervisor soon. Edited to add, direnv just gets installed via `nix-env` but I wish it were using nix-darwin. I'll probably get to write a blog post about this in a couple months.
bpye 4y ago
I’ve never had an issue with Nix itself on macOS but there are occasionally packages that are broken on macOS but work on Linux - despite upstream supporting macOS.

dindresto 4y ago

You might want to give the new installer by Determinate Systems a try: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer

ziml77 4y ago
I'm definitely going to give that a try. I had issues with the Bash script on macOS and was annoyed that it left me with a system that I had to manually clean up.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SkyMarshal 4y ago

Hard to answer your question without info on what the problem is, but lots of people use it on MacOS. Maybe ask about your problem on /r/nixos or https://discourse.nixos.org/ https://discourse.nixos.org/.

kaba0 4y ago

It absolutely works and is the best thing since sliced bread within package managers — many UNIX tools are just simply broken on Mac (not always on the packaging side), and in case of more niche tools it is simply not a priority.

striking 4y ago

I ship a development environment to a fleet of ~100 engineer laptops based on Nix. If it didn't work, I'd be out of a job

thisismyswamp 4y ago
Why would engineers need their environment shipped to them by a human?
- striking 4y ago
  Technically they `git pull` it themselves, but the fact that it continues to work involves a human.
  - tmountain 4y ago
    Do they run NixOS or just use the package manager? What’s the host OS?
    - striking 4y ago
      They run macOS, pull a repo, run a setup script. They get a multi-user Nix install with a direnv integration that boots up project-local daemons. Think Postgres, Redis, and so on; those are all available, along with the Nix packages the env needs, while their current working directory is that of a project folder. Very few things live outside of the project, but the things that do are unfortunately stateful. We'll be solving that soon, too.
      - earthling8118 4y ago
        Is the direnv integration custom or do you base it off of something? I use direnv extensively but I don't have it start any project daemons currently and I've been shipping scripts via devShell for managing them. I'd be very interested in this
        striking 4y ago
        We use nix-direnv mostly for the caching support and we use s6 as basically an init system but per project. Besides that it's all custom. We're looking to replace s6 with our own supervisor soon. Edited to add, direnv just gets installed via `nix-env` but I wish it were using nix-darwin. I'll probably get to write a blog post about this in a couple months.

bpye 4y ago

I’ve never had an issue with Nix itself on macOS but there are occasionally packages that are broken on macOS but work on Linux - despite upstream supporting macOS.