9 ms·

https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos The homebrew team seems incredibly burnt-out, to the point

https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos https://nixos.org/download.html#nix-install-macos The homebrew team seems incredibly burnt-out, to the point of hostility. I've really enjoyed the nixpkgs community so far and encourage others to check it out; it hasn't replaced homebrew entirely for me (yet), but it's getting closer every day.

oxonia 3y ago
Yes, the Homebrew message does seem unnecessarily hostile. Not everyone can afford to buy a brand new computer every year.
- Condition1952 3y ago
  Those peasants are bound to suffer the wrath of planned obsolescence. macOS could be a modular rolling release, but you need to milk the peasants from time to time
- dgacmu 3y ago
  This seems a little exaggerated? Macos 12 will run on most Macs from 2015 and later. 8 year old hardware isn't Earth shattering, but it's also not a "hostile" period of time for a non-commercial open source project to support. And it's certainly not "new hardware every year".
  - WillPostForFood 3y ago
    The "period of time" isn't what was hostile.
    - Uehreka 3y ago
      Edit: nevermind
- musicale 3y ago
  I wish there were a macOS (and Homebrew) "extended support" edition with security patches for 10 years rather than 7. Old Macs are often perfectly usable in terms of hardware, but macOS security updates have left them behind. As of today, it's likely that the 2016 Mac I'm writing this on (which can run Monterey but not Ventura or Sonoma) is out of support. Of course the Mac apocalypse will be when x86 support is dropped, possibly starting in the next macOS release.
  - mrpippy 3y ago
    If the expected pattern holds, macOS Monterey will be getting security updates for another year.
  - MilaM 3y ago
    Completely agree. I have two perfectly good but now unsupported 5K iMacs from 2015 and 2017 in my household, both don't get any more upgrades. Heck, I would even pay up to 100 EUR/USD for longer support. But that's probably not a viable business case for Apple anymore.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      Have you tried to install some Linux distro (like Fedora or Ubuntu) on it? If your workflow allows it, of course. I found how well Linux works on my relatively old Apple hardware. And I can use it most of the time, just need to learn some new tools, as many I’m familiar with are macOS only.
      - MilaM 3y ago
        I know my way around Linux, as a server OS at least. The issue with switching is more about my previous investment in buying and learning dozens of third-party apps. I also must say that I value the integration between macOS and iOS a lot. Once my (i)Macs stop receiving security updates though, I might try a Linux distro, just to give them a second life.
    - breakfastduck 3y ago
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  One of the problems with OSS burnout is this many-to-one relationship with the users and maintainer. It’s sort of like the relationship between an outfielder and the bleacher crowd at a baseball game. Maintainers get requests to do things they have no interest in, like maintaining software for OSes past a certain date. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are a lot, and they can even be mean. The maintainer can block these users individually, but it’s different users all the time, so that doesn’t stop it. So, the maintainer addresses the user base, the whole crowd all at once. The problem is most of these users haven’t seen these interactions, so the message seems hostile. Having someone say “I owe you nothing.” seems really weird when you’ve never asked them for anything. Or, if they list of all the ways and reasons for you to not contact them it looks hostile. The users don’t see the fan next to them throwing a beer can at the center fielder.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    It's not burnout. The homebrew team have been insufferable and egotistical for a long time. Max Howell (founder of homebrew) went to interview at Google, shoved a coding exercise back in their faces, made a snotty comment about how all the engineers at Google using Macs use his code and how dare they blah blah greatest engineer in the world blah blah, and walked out the door. That coding exercise was likely given to him precisely because all the google engineers had a lot of experience using brew, or they did it as ego check to see if he'd be insufferable to work with. Howell failed to realize that and instead went and bragged about it on twitter, almost certainly confirming for the hiring committee that things had worked exactly as designed. Whole lot of fucking sass from a man who either didn't care or didn't know about the security implications of making a directory in the default path user-writeable, thus making probably hundreds of thousands of developer's systems less secure: https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-a-major-security-flaw-install-macports-instead/ https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-...
    - johnsea 3y ago
      I am glad that there are people like Max Howell who write such (for me) great package managers. In opposite to what you write, here in a quote reply he comes across as very friendly: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... PS: if really a lot of Googlers use brew I hope they also generously support the project (do. Apple)
- rimliu 3y ago
  Not everyone can afford supporting old OSes.
mdaniel 3y ago
I want to like Nix but those installation instructions for macOS (and their removal friend) are just crazypants as compared to the `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` from the Linux version And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface
- abathur 3y ago
  Try running `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` on modern macOS.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface Are you running garbage collection? It gets out of hand if you keep all versions, but you don't need to do that
- faitswulff 3y ago
  The Determinate Systems nix installer is quite smooth: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/ https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/ Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.
  - iFreilicht 3y ago
    Yeah, that's a long-running and pretty much unfixable issue as macOS updates overwrite /etc/zshrc. AFAIK, the determinate systems installer does somewhat resolve this as you can just run it again and it will fix the issue. The default installer is not idempotent yet (and my work on trying to resolve that has stalled, unfortunately, see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603), so trying to run it again to fix this issue will result in errors.
    - faitswulff 3y ago
bshacklett 3y ago
My issue with Nix is that you are forced to install packages in a global location. Why is it that every package manager assumes I’m an administrator on my machine? Even if I am, how does it make sense to take over a global directory as a single user?
- miniBill 3y ago
  Nix does not require you to be an administrator to install a package though!
  - raunakchhatwal 3y ago
    I think he may be referring to installing Nix itself, which does require root even if the intention isn't to install anything system-wide. I did once think about modifying the nix installer to let me set an arbitrary nix store because I wanted nix packages in a docker container I was debugging, but never really got around to it. Let me know if you know of somebody else who tried this.
    - iFreilicht 3y ago
      So this is possible, but there are a lot of caveats. First, the installer itself explicitly says: ``` # Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the # default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it. readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix" ``` I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1] However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part. So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios. You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself. [1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.html?highlight=NIX_STORE#env-NIX_STORE_DIR https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.h... (you can also relocate most other directories. The `prefix` in the paths is `/nix`)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
KingLancelot 3y ago
[dead]
axelav 3y ago
Is there a good guide on how to replace homebrew with nix? I've been curious for a while but always end up with 30 tabs open and giving up.

oxonia 3y ago

Yes, the Homebrew message does seem unnecessarily hostile. Not everyone can afford to buy a brand new computer every year.

Condition1952 3y ago
Those peasants are bound to suffer the wrath of planned obsolescence. macOS could be a modular rolling release, but you need to milk the peasants from time to time
dgacmu 3y ago
This seems a little exaggerated? Macos 12 will run on most Macs from 2015 and later. 8 year old hardware isn't Earth shattering, but it's also not a "hostile" period of time for a non-commercial open source project to support. And it's certainly not "new hardware every year".
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  The "period of time" isn't what was hostile.
  - Uehreka 3y ago
    Edit: nevermind
musicale 3y ago
I wish there were a macOS (and Homebrew) "extended support" edition with security patches for 10 years rather than 7. Old Macs are often perfectly usable in terms of hardware, but macOS security updates have left them behind. As of today, it's likely that the 2016 Mac I'm writing this on (which can run Monterey but not Ventura or Sonoma) is out of support. Of course the Mac apocalypse will be when x86 support is dropped, possibly starting in the next macOS release.
- mrpippy 3y ago
  If the expected pattern holds, macOS Monterey will be getting security updates for another year.
- MilaM 3y ago
  Completely agree. I have two perfectly good but now unsupported 5K iMacs from 2015 and 2017 in my household, both don't get any more upgrades. Heck, I would even pay up to 100 EUR/USD for longer support. But that's probably not a viable business case for Apple anymore.
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    Have you tried to install some Linux distro (like Fedora or Ubuntu) on it? If your workflow allows it, of course. I found how well Linux works on my relatively old Apple hardware. And I can use it most of the time, just need to learn some new tools, as many I’m familiar with are macOS only.
    - MilaM 3y ago
      I know my way around Linux, as a server OS at least. The issue with switching is more about my previous investment in buying and learning dozens of third-party apps. I also must say that I value the integration between macOS and iOS a lot. Once my (i)Macs stop receiving security updates though, I might try a Linux distro, just to give them a second life.
  - breakfastduck 3y ago
travisjungroth 3y ago
One of the problems with OSS burnout is this many-to-one relationship with the users and maintainer. It’s sort of like the relationship between an outfielder and the bleacher crowd at a baseball game. Maintainers get requests to do things they have no interest in, like maintaining software for OSes past a certain date. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are a lot, and they can even be mean. The maintainer can block these users individually, but it’s different users all the time, so that doesn’t stop it. So, the maintainer addresses the user base, the whole crowd all at once. The problem is most of these users haven’t seen these interactions, so the message seems hostile. Having someone say “I owe you nothing.” seems really weird when you’ve never asked them for anything. Or, if they list of all the ways and reasons for you to not contact them it looks hostile. The users don’t see the fan next to them throwing a beer can at the center fielder.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  It's not burnout. The homebrew team have been insufferable and egotistical for a long time. Max Howell (founder of homebrew) went to interview at Google, shoved a coding exercise back in their faces, made a snotty comment about how all the engineers at Google using Macs use his code and how dare they blah blah greatest engineer in the world blah blah, and walked out the door. That coding exercise was likely given to him precisely because all the google engineers had a lot of experience using brew, or they did it as ego check to see if he'd be insufferable to work with. Howell failed to realize that and instead went and bragged about it on twitter, almost certainly confirming for the hiring committee that things had worked exactly as designed. Whole lot of fucking sass from a man who either didn't care or didn't know about the security implications of making a directory in the default path user-writeable, thus making probably hundreds of thousands of developer's systems less secure: https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-a-major-security-flaw-install-macports-instead/ https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-...
  - johnsea 3y ago
    I am glad that there are people like Max Howell who write such (for me) great package managers. In opposite to what you write, here in a quote reply he comes across as very friendly: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... PS: if really a lot of Googlers use brew I hope they also generously support the project (do. Apple)
rimliu 3y ago
Not everyone can afford supporting old OSes.

mdaniel 3y ago

I want to like Nix but those installation instructions for macOS (and their removal friend) are just crazypants as compared to the `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` from the Linux version And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface

abathur 3y ago
Try running `sudo mkdir /nix && sudo chown $USER /nix` on modern macOS.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> And that's not even getting into the "waaa?" from `du -hs /nix` although I am open to that being a misleading number due to hardlinks and other trickery that du may not correctly surface Are you running garbage collection? It gets out of hand if you keep all versions, but you don't need to do that
faitswulff 3y ago
The Determinate Systems nix installer is quite smooth: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/ https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/ Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.
- iFreilicht 3y ago
  Yeah, that's a long-running and pretty much unfixable issue as macOS updates overwrite /etc/zshrc. AFAIK, the determinate systems installer does somewhat resolve this as you can just run it again and it will fix the issue. The default installer is not idempotent yet (and my work on trying to resolve that has stalled, unfortunately, see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/7603), so trying to run it again to fix this issue will result in errors.
  - faitswulff 3y ago

bshacklett 3y ago

My issue with Nix is that you are forced to install packages in a global location. Why is it that every package manager assumes I’m an administrator on my machine? Even if I am, how does it make sense to take over a global directory as a single user?

miniBill 3y ago
Nix does not require you to be an administrator to install a package though!
- raunakchhatwal 3y ago
  I think he may be referring to installing Nix itself, which does require root even if the intention isn't to install anything system-wide. I did once think about modifying the nix installer to let me set an arbitrary nix store because I wanted nix packages in a docker container I was debugging, but never really got around to it. Let me know if you know of somebody else who tried this.
  - iFreilicht 3y ago
    So this is possible, but there are a lot of caveats. First, the installer itself explicitly says: ``` # Please don't change this. We don't support it, because the # default shell profile that comes with Nix doesn't support it. readonly NIX_ROOT="/nix" ``` I haven't seen any configurations where the entire /nix is relocated, but nix _does_ support relocating the store with the environment variable `NIX_STORE_DIR`.[1] However, this means that you can no longer use the the binary cache and *everything* you install has to be compiled from scratch, including glibc. The reason is that nix usually patches paths like `/bin/myprogram` to `/nix/store/1238f...-myprogram-1.2.3/bin/myprogram` in everything that depends on `myprogram` during build time to isolate the build outputs from the system. If you change your store, all those paths will now be invalid, including the hash part. So using a nix store that isn't `/nix/store` is possible, but I don't think anyone is actually doing it except in a few select scenarios. You can also compile nix itself with a different root. That will work as expected, but you still have the issue that you need to compile everything you install yourself. [1]: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.html?highlight=NIX_STORE#env-NIX_STORE_DIR https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/env-common.h... (you can also relocate most other directories. The `prefix` in the paths is `/nix`)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

axelav 3y ago

Is there a good guide on how to replace homebrew with nix? I've been curious for a while but always end up with 30 tabs open and giving up.