[anarchogeek]

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]

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

[ziml77]

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.

[striking]

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]

Why would engineers need their environment shipped to them by a human?

[striking]

Technically they `git pull` it themselves, but the fact that it continues to work involves a human.

[tmountain]

Do they run NixOS or just use the package manager? What’s the host OS?

[striking]

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]

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

[kaba0]

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.

[SkyMarshal]

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/.

[bpye]

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.