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by runeks 1278 days ago
I have a MBP M1 and considered this, but instead I went with NixOS running in a VM inside macOS: https://xyno.space/post/nixos-utm-rosetta. This means I can use all the stuff that Linux-on-M1 currently doesn't support (e.g. webcam, power management, external displays) in macOS while having a NixOS instance available too.

It should also -- at least theoretically — allow me to use Rosetta to run x86 Linux binaries. However, I'm getting segfaults when trying to build certain Nix derivations this way: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/local-x86-64-nix-builder-on-ar...
1 comments
MuffinFlavored 1278 days ago
Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`?

Can you "prove" that what you use NixOS for isn't overkill?

Everything I read about NixOS is how it's reproducible or something. I set up Cargo for Rust once and never thought about it again. Where does the need to reproduce toolchains come from?

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runeks 1278 days ago
> Can you give an example of what you use NixOS for that can't be easily replaced by like... `brew install ...`?

Sure. At work I needed access to the office VPN. I copied a snippet into a single configuration file and everything just worked. It installed the necessary executables, and set up the needed services including the config files for these services.

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MuffinFlavored 1278 days ago
How is this different than installing Tunnelblick and pointing it to a .ovpn file (which I've done)?

Could you share that Nix VPN config file example please?

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