[mjsweet]

My partner is an Astrophysicist who relies on Gnu Emacs as her daily driver. Her work involves managing a treasure trove of legacy code written in a variety of languages like Fortran, Matlab, IDL, and IRAF. This code is essential for her data reduction pipelines, supporting instruments across observatories such as Keck 1 & 2, the AAT, Gemini, and more.

Each time she acquires a new Mac, she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch. It's not because she enjoys it; rather, it's a necessity because the built-in migration assistant just doesn't cut it for her specialised needs.

While she currently wields the power of an M1 Max MacBook Pro and runs on the Monterey operating system, she tends to stick with the pre-installed OS for the lifespan of her hardware, which often spans several years. In her case, this could be another 2-3 years or even more before she retires the machine or hands it over to a postdoc or student.

But why does she avoid the annual OS upgrades? It's simple. About a decade ago, every OS update would wreak havoc on her meticulously set-up environment. Paths would break, software would malfunction, and libraries that used to reside in one place mysteriously migrated to another. The headache and disruptions were just not worth it.

She decided to call it quits on annual OS upgrades roughly 7-8 years ago. While I've suggested Docker as a potential solution, it still requires her to take on the role of administrator and caretaker, which, in her busy world of astrophysical research, can be quite the distraction.

[gempir]

This is really weird thing to complain about.

When your partner builds her entire dev environment against a very specific version, packages etc. and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version? If you don't put any effort into using containers, vms or even just basic setup scripts then yeah this will not work out.

I've worked with a few physicists and they are scientists first and developers second. Which is okay, but will lead to janky setups that you cannot simply upgrade the OS under.

I want actual updates of my OS and don't want to be stuck forever on some specific version of openssh because some Astrophysicist decides to built her dev environment against it.

So either build a reproducible dev environment or don't complain that you cannot update without issues.

[impendia]

I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

[pdimitar]

I am a programmer with 22 years of practice and I stand with you.

The churn gets very tiring at one point and you begin to suspect that the people who impose it on you actually have no clue what they're doing and are taking the easy way out because they want to clock out for the week. Which I do understand but pretending that it's for the good of everyone is obviously bogus.

IMO all you scientist folks should work closely with a few programmers and sysadmins and have them author you tools to bring up and down various environments. It's easy and it's much more churn-proof than what we currently do.

I am still in the process of authoring a script to bring up my dev environment everywhere I go, I need to iron out a few kinks in the initial bootstrap (as in, OS and Linux-distro specific ways to install several critically important tools before installing everything else) and I'll just provision a few laptops at home and a VM in the cloud and be done with it.

It's annoying but ultimately a worth investment. Look into it and ask your dev friends.

[hulitu]

> I am an academic mathematician, and I've noticed a huge culture difference between academia (at least in mathematics) and software development.

> In the software world, it seems to be universally accepted that everything will change, all of the time, and one needs to keep up. If your dependencies break, it's your responsibility to update those too. Hence software "maintenance", which requires a lot of effort.

> In my world, maintenance is not a concern. If I write a paper, then once it's done it's done. Academic papers, too, have dependencies: "By Theorem 3.4 of Jones and Smith [14], we can conclude that every quasiregular foozle is blahblah, and therefore..." You don't have to worry that Jones and Smith are going to rewrite their paper, change their definition of "quasiregular", or renumber everything.

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

Those are the problem with SW developers: they don't have a concept of a finished product and (some of them) never finish the product.

[dharmab]

Because our software is generally not deployed into "finished" environments. Even the Voyager probes get software updates to deal with their changing environments and hardware!

[tpmoney]

I think this is somewhat unfair. Software doesn’t “require” maintenance anymore than anything else does. If you’re happy with the state of the world as it exists at the moment in time you create the software, it will continue to run that way for as long as you have working hardware to run it on. A compiled application on a computer with a frozen set of software is just as permanent as any academic paper.

The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates, and that requires changes which in turn creates maintenance.

Software maintenance is less comparable to a single academic paper than it is to the entire field of academia. Sure Freud's papers are all exactly as they were when he published, but if you want to be in the field of psychology you’re going to have a bad time if that’s the most recent version of your academic “software stack”

[impendia]

From what I've read on HN, software certainly requires maintenance if you're hoping that others will buy or use what you've developed. That's the comparison I'm trying to make.

> The problem is most people aren’t happy with stuff being the same way forever. They want new things and new updates

I agree, from what I can tell. Personally I'd prefer that software UI not change nearly as often as it does, but I concede that I'm apparently in the minority.

[ansonhoyt]

Perhaps if the software is more isolated? Many good points here, and I absolutely can avoid a lot of maintenance by my choice of languages and libraries, BUT just being online (or even on-network) forces quite a bit of maintenance.

I'm generally writing web apps, requiring me to keep up with a stream of security updates just to stay online: browsers deprecated TLS 1.0 and 1.1 [1], browsers require TLS certificates to be renewed ~annually, languages only fix security vulnerabilities for the last few releases, etc. Even linux kernels are getting shorter support going forward. [3]

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/237688/when-wil...

[2] https://www.digicert.com/faq/public-trust-and-certificates/h...

[3] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-kernel-reduction-...

[tpmoney]

I feel like all of this falls under "people don't want stuff to stay the same". Being online at all is a commitment to being in an ever changing environment, especially with respect to security and encryption. Fixing security vulnerabilities is declining to accept software as it is. Likewise, kernel support only matters if you're upgrading the hardware. To use an extreme example, you can (provided the hardware itself is still working) take a C64 from the 80's, plug it into the wall and use it as if it were 1984 all day long. Everything will work just fine. You might not be able to connect to any BBS anymore, but that isn't because the software required changes or maintenance to keep working, but because society itself changed and no one offers a C64 compatible dial-up BBS. To bring it to a physical analogy again, your 1950's encyclopedia set won't have anything to say about the internet or cellular technology, but that's not because your encyclopedia doesn't work any more, it's because the world around it has changed.

[droopyEyelids]

Formal mathematics is the ONLY aspect of human life where you can get something “right” and it doesnt change.

Supremely unrealistic expectation anywhere else

[KolenCh]

I think you missed the point of reproducibility. If a stack is maintained with the mindset of reproducibility, then it will do exactly what you said, that it will never change and always works and don’t need to be maintained.

If the software stack is reproducible, then you decouple that to the environment and hence upgrading the OS shouldn’t break it.

(That said it is very difficult to be 100% reproducible, eg your hardware can change from x64 to arm64… that’s why people are suggesting docker. I don’t like docker in the sense that it is a lazy approach to make things reproducible. But the guarantee there is very high.)

[lelanthran]

> Different cultures. Personally, I prefer my own.

For science, not really - what use is the GP's partner's data if it cannot be reproduced?

I know, I know ... scientists go ahead and publish non-reproducible studies anyway, but it's widely acknowledged as bad science.

For scientists, containers seem to be a much more important than just about anything else, especially for publications, because reproducibility is at the core of the work being done.

[kazinator]

Hey I'm in the software world; you're describing the ignorant asshole software world.

[Reason077]

> "This is really weird thing to complain about."

What made you think the OP's post was a complaint? It seems reasonable to defer upgrades if you know they're going to break things and create a lot of extra admin work when you'd rather just be getting your job done.

I feel the same pain myself. Major macOS upgrades typically always break things, either in my dev environment or just by introducing bugs or breaking/removing/changing some random OS feature that I like using.

Its usually only Xcode which forces me to upgrade, since at some point in each release cycle Apple starts requiring the latest macOS for the latest Xcode, which in turn is required if you want to target/deploy to the latest iOS. If it wasn't for that I'd prefer to stick to one major version for 2-3 years.

[Suzuran]

Unacceptable. Deferring updates is always absolutely unacceptable. Security updates must always be given absolute priority over all other concerns. If security isn't breaking your workflow then your security is not extensive enough, and if security isn't your absolute top priority then you are doing security wrong. On the defensive side you are either perfect in your compliance or you are penetrated. This is an invariant. TLDR if security isn't breaking your workflow then your security isn't secure and you are part of the problem. You should be thankful when security stops you from working because that means your security is working.

[Reason077]

We're talking about major version updates, ie: going from Ventura (13.x) to Sonoma (14.x). Those are the ones that have signficant changes and tend to break things.

Apple does release maintenance and security updates for older macOS releases for several years (for example, Monterey 12.7.1 and Ventura 13.6.1 were both released in the past week or so). I always install those right away, as I assume most people do.

[Suzuran]

I apologize; I assumed the over-the-top tone and absurd sentence at the end would be taken as indications of obvious sarcasm.

If your own security (or anything else for that matter) prevents you from working it's clearly not to your benefit.

[xkcd-sucks]

I'm aware of at least one major academic lab, the kind where the PI is a rockstar scientist-cum-entrepreneur and gets a six figure salary from multiple institutions in addition to spinoff startup income, who has had cryptominer malware on their website servers for a few years and doesn't care to go beyond deleting executable every time the website is updated (which naturally comes back immediately afterwords)

Not that this is "acceptable" by any means, just a single calibration point

[mrweasel]

While I can see some minor issues with version upgrades, some software simply have breaking changes, but mostly I'm surprised when people manages to create environments that are really locked to a single OS version.

It used to happen on Windows quite a bit, through now fault of Microsoft. People for one reason or another sometimes see to go out of their way to ensure that their software is tied entirely to one specific version of one operating system.

We dealt with a customer who could upgrade a server, required to use newer TLS versions, but their custom software was pretty much locked to Windows Server 2008. They couldn't even build the software on something newer. I quite honestly don't know how people keep ending up in that situation. I don't think they do it on purpose, but the way they insist on working just makes things work out that way.

[Dalewyn]

Tools exist to serve its user, and so long as a tool keeps working there's no reason to replace it. In real life this is how tools are. You own a screwdriver and you use it until one day it breaks, and then you go and buy a new screwdriver just like your old one.

This is fundamentally different from the nature of computer software, which can completely change in scope and function from one version to another and introduce changes that "break" something for no good reason as far as the user is concerned.

Imagine for a moment if you will: You use your screwdriver everyday, but one day the handle suddenly changes to something completely new and the shaft falls out because the handle uses a new way of fastening the shaft.

You are told by the manufacturer to come in and have it replaced with the newest model, or if they're not so gracious they tell you to come in and buy the newest model.

And for what reason? The screwdriver was working fine until yesterday. You hate this, because as just a simple user there's no good reason the screwdriver suddenly changed itself. Whether you get it replaced or buy a new one, you're wasting time and even money.

You then realize, one way or another, you can just tell your screwdriver that it cannot change without your assent. Ever. You want, perhaps need your screwdriver to work everyday, so you tell it to never change. The manufacturer keeps changing their screwdriver, but yours never changes and it keeps working.

One day though, the screwdriver finally breaks and you need a new one. So you go and buy a new screwdriver. Except it's completely different. And completely incompatible with the rest of your workshop, and all the tools inside which you likewise told to never change.

Why is the computer world so fucking shit?

[mrweasel]

I don't disagree with the tool part and the article is about Apple breaking grep, so fair enough.

My point is that this mostly doesn't happen, yet some people manages to build workflows that for one reason or another gets locked to specific versions of an OS. In my experience that's actually pretty hard to do. The only obvious examples I can think of is the Python 3 migration (which is perhaps why that took years longer than it should have) and certain security related issues.

Maybe it's due to the way some think about computers, maybe it's just bad luck, maybe computers just never change that dramatically for the tooling I use. From the outside it just looks like people go out of their way to lock themselves in, in ways the developers and engineers never imagined or advised.

I love to know more precisely what it is that keeps breaking in the case of this astrophysicist, because I'm betting it's not Emacs. Realistically it's one or more highly specialized programs which has been poorly written and/or packaged badly, if packaged at all.

[jrmg]

Perhaps this is not true for the astrophysicist, but my general experience with the systems of people who experience frequent upgrade-induced-breakage is that they change the system rather than working within it. Switch out things. Switch BSD utilities for GNU equivalents at the system level. Change the configuration of OS services that were never designed to be changed. Do simple looking, but actually really invasive, ‘QOL’ hacks that they found on StackOverflow and the like.

macOS’s SIP is designed to combat malware - but it’s also designed to stop people shooting themselves in the foot by doing things like this.

Note that I’m not trying to make the argument that modifying your system should be _impossible_ to do - I’m sure someone will cry out about ‘software freedom’ - but I do think that some people do it without understanding the consequences.

Generally, it’s possible to customize your user environment without delving into OS internals. To a large degree, even - for example, on Mac Homebrew has, in recent years at least, become very good at this. And my experience, at least, is that if you don’t mess with the underlying _system_, OS upgrades proceed smoothly.

[rfmpie]

Screwdrivers are extremely simple. Computers are extremely complex and subject to complex environments. I'm not sure this is a fair analogy.

[Dalewyn]

Then that's an argument to make computers simpler.

A tool that keeps spontaneously changing under its user's feet is not a particularly useful tool.

[Cyphase]

I bet screwdrivers and similar tools would have to change more often if the laws of physics changed out from under them.

[flir]

There was a time when every macos upgrade broke VMware, guaranteed. I too am extremely conservative about OS upgrades. Why take the risk when there's almost no benefit? Let the early adopters iron out the bugs for you.

[gempir]

VMware is a highly complicated piece of software relying on a lot of internals of how macOS works. I think it's reasonable to expect that it won't "just work"

I don't say you have to update, but in time security updates will no longer come for your version of macOS and in addition to that you will won't even get new features, like in the new macOS Version the openssh version is newer and now almost fully supports yubikey ssh keys stuff like that.

[flir]

Monterey's got Universal Control (the last OS feature I actually wanted) and the last security update was 8 days ago.

I imagine this laptop will be retired before it needs an OS upgrade but who knows, maybe I'll hit a piece of software that won't run on Monterey before then.

I just checked and everything at least as far back as Yosemite gets three years support. Seems I've got a year before I need to seriously worry about Monterey.

[eptcyka]

This is a very weak excuse.

[wiseowise]

> and then you expect it to just work next macOS Version?

Yes I do. I couldn’t give a s how much security stuff or how many developer issues update solves, backwards compatibility is king. The older I get, the more I am about this. I have million things to take in my life, I’ve paid 3k for this thing and you expect me to sysadmin it on top?

[kaycey2022]

This is OK for OS stuff but what do you do when xcode upgrade breaks how your apps are linked. This is what happened this time with erlang which uses wx for some of the apps. Now the poor erlang team has to backport fixes for all old versions as well.

[jonhohle]

You might suggest she write a MacPorts Portfile(s) (or the Homebrew equivalent) that describes the her setup. It is a distraction, but hopefully a one time distraction. It doesn’t have the overhead of running docker, gives her all the tools in well-known paths. IMHO (and as a fan), MacPorts has an advantage over HomeBrew by having all dependencies vendored so OS updates have less impact.

Edit to add, if you or her want help with this, I wouldn’t mind helping, reach out to my username at gmail.

[koito17]

> MacPorts has an advantage over HomeBrew by having all dependencies vendored so OS updates have less impact.

I use MacPorts, but be careful stating this. libc is unstable between major releases of Mac OS, and the recommendation from the MacPorts project itself is to reinstall *all* of your ports after an OS upgrade.[1] This is not a fun process if you don't delay updating until the build bots for the latest OS go online. Also note it is literally impossible to statically link libc in Mac OS applications.[2]

Realistically speaking, I think Nix is likely to be a better alternative to both MacPorts and Homebrew for setting up dev environments, since you will have a declarative file format rather than ad-hoc Tcl (or Ruby) scripts running a function for fetch, verify, configure, build, destroot, etc. The only reason I personally don't use Nix is because MacPorts has more or less just worked for me and I haven't had the motivation to learn how Nix really works.

[1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index...

[spease]

Nix is great in theory, but the user experience is unacceptably bad, especially for anyone who isn’t a software engineer.

While it does do an excellent job of reproducibility if the inputs are the same, I’ve found it to be prone to be breaking if you switch to newer versions.

Part of the reason that it’s painful to use is because while it’s marketed as “declarative”, in actuality it’s functional, which results in a lot of convoluted syntax to modify parameters for a package, which varies based on the language of the package.

There seems to be some awareness of the usability issues, but the changes have seemed both a step forward and backwards. For instance, you used to be able to use the “nix search” command to look up package names; now it’s gated behind some arcane syntax because it’s “experimental” and something to do with flakes. And flakes seems like it has the consequence of fragmenting the package repositories and making it impractical to improve the language.

I still have helper functions to wrap desktop applications that I had to set aside, because some upstream changes broke it and neither I nor anyone on the nix forums could figure out if there was even a way to include them in the “darwin” namespace with an overlay. My goal was to make it as easy as homebrew to add an app to nix’s repository.

Another evening I sat down to make a minor feature to a Python library and decided to use a nix environment. In theory, this should have been better than a virtualenv. In practice, there’s no in-tree support for specifying specific versions of Python libraries, and mach-nix had trouble with the dependencies, so I wound up just filing a bug report and gave up on the feature I was trying to implement.

On the plus side, NixOS finally has a graphic installer, but I don’t think that helps macOS.

I’m still hopeful that the community will decide to prioritize usability, but after spending an aggregate of months of time trying to get things to work and continually running into time-consuming roadblocks, it’s not something I would recommend lightly to someone who wants to be more productive.

[emptysongglass]

> Nix is great in theory, but the user experience is unacceptably bad, especially for anyone who isn’t a software engineer.

This is a pretty extravagant claim. It was once very bad but there's now a large quantity of tooling that makes it as easy to work with as Homebrew.

For managing their home, people can use Fleek, which makes Home Manager straightforward to work with: https://getfleek.dev/

[ghusbands]

It feels like every time someone complains about Nix being hard to use and understand, there's a response that claims it's great and that you just have to use X or Y. Oddly, what X or Y are seem to differ greatly.

[emptysongglass]

That's literally why we make tools, so yes. Claims of Nix is too hard are like the BTRFS is unstable camp (which thankfully has mostly died out): they're holdovers from when these things were true.

You have an entire industry building on top of Nix. Nix itself is complex because it has to be. Its DSL didn't need to be so terrible but the ideas Nix packages are not easy.

So use the layer above the thing that is complex to make that thing easy. That's what tools are for.

[lloeki]

I don't buy the "just use X or Y" either. It's like "just use ohmyzsh".

That's why I use dead simple nix stuff, which gets me 90% of the way (more like 140% if compared to Homebrew). If one's goal is to replace - and solve a few problems inherent to - homebrew or apt it's really not hard, see my sibling comment.

[hollandheese]

> now a large quantity of tooling that makes it as easy to work with as Homebrew.

Now, that's a pretty extravagant claim. Homebrew can be used by basically anyone. It took me several attempts in the past few days to even get Home Manager installed with Nix on Fedora Silverblue because the Home Manager 23.05 channel package was broken and I had to use the master channel package to get it to work.

[lloeki]

> This is a pretty extravagant claim

If one wants to just replace Homebrew it's really straightforward:

Install:

    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
    sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

Usage:

    brew update              nix channel --update
    brew list                nix-env --query --installed
    brew search ruby         nix-env --query --available --status ruby  (or https://search.nixos.org/packages)
    brew install ruby@3.2    nix-env --install -A nixpkgs.ruby_3_2
    brew upgrade             nix-env --upgrade
    brew uninstall ruby      nix-env --uninstall ruby

I really don't see how it is "unacceptably bad". You don't even have to understand anything about Nix and still be able to use the damn thing. Yes the real-version vs attribute-name-that-contains-a-version is a bit wonky but in practice that's seriously not an issue.

But really, for versions you can actually pick whatever version you wish by hitting a specific channel state:

    nix-env -f https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-23.05.tar.gz -iA ruby
    nix-env -f https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/88f63d51109.tar.gz -iA ruby

... which is a) completely generalisable for anything even those packages that don't have versions and b) completely removes any problems with dependency version conflicts.

---

(Screw naysayers that would tell you not to use nix-env, because that is just not productive to turn people away. In practice nix-env works, as in, it pragmatically solves the real-world above problem for people, who can later decide on their own if they want to stop there or move to "better" things should they feel any limitation with that or another use case; and at that stage they'll be more comfortable doing so than when they just start using the thing. Best way to climb a mountain is one step at a time.)

---

And then from there you get the other benefit of being immediately able to ramp up to having a per-project `shell.nix` and just be done with it by typing `nix-shell`:

    {
      pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {},
    }:
    pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        pkgs.ruby_3_2;
      ];
    }

Or if like me you want to get fancy†:

    {
      pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {},
    }:
    let
      # because I like it this way and can later reference ${ruby}
      ruby = pkgs.ruby_3_2;
      whatevs = pkgs.whatevs42;
    in pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        ruby
        whatevs
        pkgs.foobar
      ];

      # this is not nix-related, I just find that convenient
      shellHook = ''
        export RUBY_VERSION="$(ruby -e 'puts RUBY_VERSION.gsub(/\d+$/, "0")')"
        export GEM_HOME="$(pwd)/vendor/bundle/ruby/$RUBY_VERSION"
        export BUNDLE_PATH="$(pwd)/vendor/bundle"
        export PATH="$GEM_HOME/bin:$PATH"
      '';
    }

Replace with this if you want to pin to a specific point in time:

    pkgs ? import(fetchTarball("https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/31b322916ae1.tar.gz")) {},

You can even have multiple of those:

    pkgsA ? import(fetchTarball("https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/31b322916ae1.tar.gz")) {},
    pkgsB ? import(fetchTarball("https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/88f63d51109.tar.gz")) {},

    ...

      buildInputs = [
        pkgsA.foo
        pkgsB.bar
      ];

Bonus: it also Just Works on your favorite Linux distro.

In under 5min it can be immediately useful to anyone who knows how to use a package manager (may it brew or pacman or apt) without having to dive on any Nix detail. I will not buy that nixlang is a barrier in that case, you don't have to know nixlang to understand what is happening here.

† Actually I just realised that I could probably use ${ruby} - which stringifies to the installed path on disk - and do:

    export RUBY_VERSION="$(${ruby}/bin/ruby -e 'puts RUBY_VERSION.gsub(/\d+$/, "0")')"

to reference the actual path, or maybe even just ${ruby.version} or something and not even subshell capture. Not that it matters.

[spease]

Thanks for taking the time to write all this out, including the examples.

> I really don't see how it is "unacceptably bad"

1) Like you pointed out, documentation will advise against this approach. Is it it even portable (what the original thread of discussion was about)? After my initial usage of nix, I switched to following the "best practice" of writing derivations and specifying system dependencies in the configuration.nix .

2) The nix commands are undeniably more complex than their brew equivalents. If you've used nix enough to memorize them, this probably goes away. But to a casual user who only interacts with nix once in awhile, it's way easier to remember "search" than "--query --available" or "-qa". "search" also feels like a higher-level unstructured-human-readable command.

3) Even "nix-env" is sort of weird as a name, because it begs explanation of why "-env", and that starts pulling in more advanced concepts that maybe a user doesn't initially need to be exposed to. It also means then you have to remember when to use "nix" and when to use "nix-env".

As for the rest, consider the use case of setting up an environment with Python packages:

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Python

This requires memorizing more commands and syntax.

And then if you want to change something about the configuration of that Python package:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70395839/how-to-globally...

And the problem is, by this point you've long ago lost most software developers. They gave up, wrote a dockerfile with `pip install` commands, and used `sed` or `patch` or something to make the small-scale changes.

And I have to admit, while the procedural solution is not as elegant nor reproducible nor crossplatform, there's less cognitive overhead and novel syntactic constructs required than switching to a language and library that forces you to distinguish between `override`, `overrideAttrs`, and `overridePythonAttrs`.

[spease]

> large quantity of tooling

Please no. I want one tool that works well, not N tools each with their own idiomatic way of doing things that everybody has to install and learn.

Looking over the install guide, this looks like it's just as bad as nix, it just hasn't been around as long. There are three approaches to installing nix that are suggested (the vanilla route, Determinate, and "this script") that are left up to the presumably new-to-nix user to research which one to use.

Then it references flakes, as if you're expected to understand them, and links to the main nix article with dozens of pages. Then if you used the first or third approaches to install nix (but not the second), you need to run a couple shell commands.

Then you need to run a nix command. Then edit a text file. Then set your "bling" level, which just isn't explained anywhere. Then another nix command. Then another two fleek commands, which aren't even provided, even though they're the first two fleek commands the user will ever issue.

And then, finally, you've got fleek installed. I think. It could use a "Congratulations!" or some party emojis to let you know you're done, rather than immediately jumping into the deprecated install options (and why are these even here if they're deprecated? How am I as a complete n00b user supposed to make the judgment call that my need to use them outweighs them being deprecated?).

Users that are comfortable with the level of shell involvement required to install Arch may find it familiar, but I would not expect someone accustomed to primarily using a macOS UI to find it reasonable.

And this appears to mean you can manage packages (but not the version of them, nor the version of nix, so you've lost reproducibility), your path, and "bling". But presumably, not `shell.nix`. And I'm guessing anything more advanced requires you to rewrite your .yml in Nix anyway.

So it's a lot of work to ask a first-time user to do, advanced users will find it of limited usefulness, and even the install process makes it glaringly obvious that it's a very incomplete abstraction with a lot of holes.

This also means that people with Nix knowledge will be maintaining the tool and polishing its tools instead of Nix, so only a subset of downstream users will gain from any improvements. Essentially: https://xkcd.com/927/. To be fair, I realize it's not a zero-sum game, and it's probably a lot easier and more rewarding to contribute to an independent project.

Sorry for the harshness of the reply, I realize a lot of work went into fleek. My frustration comes from a place of repeatedly losing a lot of time to tools that people think are user-friendly because they mentally excuse all the work they're offloading onto the end-user as justified.

The fact of the matter is that when I reach for a tool, more often than not I want to immediately use that tool, then put it down as quickly as possible and get back to focusing on what I was doing. I don't want to execute a half-dozen commands or have to make uninformed decisions just to get started. This is why Nix itself is so frustrating to me; the end result is indeed as promised and reproducible, but getting there often involves so many edge cases, gotchas, exceptions to the rule, or simply flat-out broken stuff that it completely derails my focus from whatever I was trying to do.

I think (though perhaps its my own bias) most users are the same for any popular tool. There are some niche users that use it every day or all the time, but in the case of a package manager like nix, I probably only interact with it briefly when I need to install a new program, change dependencies for a software package, and so forth. So, a few seconds every few days or weeks. Even as a developer.

[lloeki]

> Part of the reason that it’s painful to use is because while it’s marketed as “declarative”, in actuality it’s functional

You're correct, with a twist: NixOS is declarative, nix is not - it's indeed functional machinery.

This exposes a declarative interface:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/nixos/modules
    https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
    https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/tree/master/modules

This does not:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs

but being functional makes it easier for the declarative bits to exist, e.g the next step in this case (PR pending on my side to contribute just that upstream) is:

    - creating systemd.services."nqptp" with enabled = false as a default 
    - transforming services.shairport-sync to reference systemd.services."nqptp".enabled = true when enableAirplay2 = true

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/258643

It also makes pinning/rollback to a specific version without touching the remainder of the system a spectacular non-event:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/245769

Even when `.package` is not made available it's only slightly harder to use another module with disabledModules + import.

> Another evening I sat down to make a minor feature to a Python library and decided to use a nix environment. In theory, this should have been better than a virtualenv. In practice, there’s no in-tree support for specifying specific versions of Python libraries, and mach-nix had trouble with the dependencies

Maybe you tried too hard to "nixify" everything, including managing the whole of python stuff. That's what I use:

    # shell.nix
    {
      pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {},
    }:
    let
      # get these python packages from nix
      python_packages = python-packages: [
        python-packages.pip
      ];
    
      # use this pyton version, and include the above packages
      python = pkgs.python39.withPackages python_packages;
    in pkgs.mkShell {
      buildInputs = [
        python
      ];
    
      shellHook = ''
        # get python version
        export PYTHON_VERSION="$(python -c 'import platform; import re; print(re.sub(r"\.\d+$", "", platform.python_version()))')"
    
        # replicate virtualenv behaviour
        export PIP_PREFIX="$PWD/vendor/python/$PYTHON_VERSION/packages"
        export PYTHONPATH="$PIP_PREFIX/lib/python$PYTHON_VERSION/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH"
        unset SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
        export PATH="$PIP_PREFIX/bin:$PATH"
      '';
    }

And then just `pip -r requirements` or whatever poetry you fancy.

On a specific project I needed a bit more control, and some fix because of a braindead build system. Fix once and be done with it.

    # shell.nix
    {
      pinned ? import(fetchTarball("https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/88f63d51109.tar.gz")) {},
    }:
    let
      # get these python packages from nix
      python_packages = python-packages: [
        python-packages.pip
      ];
    
      # use this pyton version, and include the above packages
      python = pinned.python39.withPackages python_packages;
    
      # control llvm/clang version (e.g for packages built from source)
      llvm = pinned.llvmPackages_12;
    in llvm.stdenv.mkDerivation {
      # unique project name for this environment derivation
      name = "whatevs.shell";
    
      buildInputs = [
        # version to use + default packages are declared above
        python
    
        # linters
        pinned.shellcheck
    
        # for scripts
        pinned.bash
        pinned.fswatch
        pinned.rsync
    
        # for c++ dependencies such as grpcio-tools
        llvm.libcxx.dev
      ];
    
      shellHook = ''
        # get python version
        export PYTHON_VERSION="$(python -c 'import platform; import re; print(re.sub(r"\.\d+$", "", platform.python_version()))')"
    
        # replicate virtualenv behaviour
        export PIP_PREFIX="$PWD/vendor/python/$PYTHON_VERSION/packages"
        export PYTHONPATH="$PIP_PREFIX/lib/python$PYTHON_VERSION/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH"
        unset SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
        export PATH="$PIP_PREFIX/bin:$PATH"
    
        # for grpcio-tools, which is building from source but doesn't pick up the proper include
        export CFLAGS="-I${llvm.libcxx.dev}/include/c++/v1"
      '';
    }

Sure that's not pure nix or flakesy or whatever, but simply delegating python things to python-land is a very pragmatic move, idealistic purity and reproducibility of everything be damned, it is instantly better than homebrew or docker because that setup gets you a consistent tooling environment on any Darwin (Intel or ARM, at whatever version) or Linux (whether it's NixOS or just nixpkgs).

Also it's super amenable to collaborators who don't know the first thing about nix: they can blindly type `nix-shell` and be all the merrier, handling their python stuff as usual, and completely removing a whole class of "it works/breaks on my machine".

[orra]

> libc is unstable between major releases of Mac OS

Really? I thought Golang on macOS switched from direct syscalls to linking against libc, because the former is unstable but the latter is stable.

[jrmg]

I’d like to see a source for that too. If libc broke its ABI between OS releases there would be chaos.

[user3939382]

> This is not a fun process if you don't delay updating until the build bots for the latest OS go online

The Sonoma installer came out for MacPorts less than a week after the release IIRC. The migration is like 4-5 shell commands. One of them takes a while as everything recompiles but it’s not interactive.

[nsagent]

Agreed. I switched from Homebrew to MacPorts a few years ago and couldn't be happier. I just delay upgrading macOS until MacPorts officially supports the latest OS (which often takes a bit longer than Homebrew).

NOTE: I briefly tried Gentoo Prefix, so I could use the same setup for both Linux and macOS, but that required quite a bit more time investment than I'm willing to deal with. I spent even less time trying out Nix, but the learning curve was steeper than I had the time for, so I gave up on it pretty quickly.

[Implicated]

Cheers to this guy.

[jiveturkey]

> dependencies vendored

did you mean versioned? if you really meant vendored, could you elaborate?

I don't know about brew, but MacPorts wasn't ready when Sonoma came out. So that's a bit of a bummer for early adopter types, or folks that need to develop their own app against beta macOS and depend on ports for their setup.

[ramzyo]

Vendoring means to bundle dependencies into a project directly (often this means copying source code and using/maintaining the copy) rather than from some other source (other packages, OS, package repo, etc). Here's an article from LWN that talks about it with a real world example: https://lwn.net/Articles/842319/

[nsagent]

Early adopters can upgrade MacPorts before it officially supports the latest OS by building from source if they have the patience and are willing to debug any broken ports.

[dylan604]

Isn't that the point of using a package manager to avoid the compiling from source and manually handling the dependency tree? Seems the better advice would be to wait for MacPorts is ready before upgrading if the software from it is that critical

[jen20]

No? Ports (and thus MacPorts) is source based. For FreeBSD, pkg provides binaries for ports, but is separate.

[coldtea]

>Isn't that the point of using a package manager to avoid the compiling from source and manually handling the dependency tree?

The point of using a package manager is to avoid "manually handling the dependency tree". Whether you build from source or not is orthogonal.

[sofixa]

Eh, the "package" in package manager kind of implies ready to use packages, not a bunch of code to be compiled if you have the environment for it.

[coldtea]

vendored just means copying the upstream code dependencies into your project.

Golang, where it is (or used to be) a common practice, even has special tooling for this, and dedicates the "vendor" directory to that.

[zxexz]

Some unsolicited, anecdotal advice I hope will be appreciated -

After several years of perennial macOS environment hell (part of which was spent working in a much more research-oriented environment - e.g. lots of ancient HPC packages, etc.), I made the jump to just using Nix on macOS [0]. Takes a little bit of learning (realistically just a couple hours to get productive IME - just enough to get acquainted with nix-shell [1] and build some configs). After a few months, I had the thought to look at what I still used brew for and realized I could just move to Nix completely - and remove Brew. I back up all my nix configs to a git repo, just in case - and whenever I switch to a new machine, or "brick" my current one - I just reinstall nix, pull in my configs, and I'm good to go - takes 5 minutes (a conservative estimate tbh). The only caveat is to just check the community [2] before upgrading to the next macOS version to make sure any issues have been ironed out. In the early days of macOS support, it was a bit finnicky between updates - I haven't had any issues for the last couple years that weren't my fault (for example, booting into recovery mode and accidentally deleting the nix store APFS volume - even then, all I had to do was reinstall nix and pull my configs).

It is so nice to just "declare" I want to use and just...use it. Want to try out ripgrep for something? `nix-shell -p ripgrep` Not what you want? just exit the shell. Too much unused crap taking up space in your Nix store? `nix-collect-garbage`.

There's even darwin-nix [3] as a sort-of "nixos-for-macos" - I started using it recently, mostly for managing macOS settings declaratively, and it's great - but honestly 99% of the usefulness I get on macOS from Nix is just using the package manager!

[0] https://nixos.org/download#nix-install-macos [1] https://nix.dev/tutorials/first-steps/declarative-shell [2] https://nixos.org/community/ [3] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

[licebmi__at__]

I have the same exact recommendation. My work laptop was stolen and setting back everything was a matter of 10 mins. I have a custom emacs configuration, templated with nix, that only calls stuff from nix store, that I’m pretty much confident that I nothing will break as long as nix works.

Btw, I still use hombrew for some stuff I’m too lazy to create derivations, but I use nix-darwin homebrew module to also manage it with nix. The shitty part is that I must install homebrew. I think that can also be automated with a simple activation script, but I’m too lazy and it’s not something I do more than once on the machine.

[dlyons]

Hey, I have a pretty extensive Emacs configuration [1] on my Macbook using Nix, nix-darwin, and the Nix community Emacs overlay. It's been stable across multiple OS updates, and if minor stuff breaks 99% of the time an issue is already open as it's broken for everyone. Really, Nix is pretty awesome for the dev environment use case; bore yourself through the syntax and be rewarded with an easily reproducible system.

[1] https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config

[jamesgeck0]

There are a few cases where Nix itself can break on macOS upgrades, but the recently released Survival Mode installer should mitigate that.

https://determinate.systems/posts/nix-survival-mode-on-macos

[nrabulinski]

When you’re using nix-darwin the configuration hardly ever breaks and when it does you just run darwin-rebuild and everything works again

[viraptor]

Yeah, this is basically the perfect use case for nixpkgs. You can make sure the same versions are built every time and get configured exactly the same. Then home-manager can deal with the extra config files. No reliance on the system tools anymore beyond the core libraries and you're not bound by the brew update cadence either.

[nextos]

Came here to say the same thing. Nix can even configure Emacs with all packages, so that everything is static, deterministic, and reproducible. I am actually looking forward to the possibility of running NixOS on MacBooks.

[datadeft]

Couple of things here:

- late adoption is a synonym to remain production ready. We used to have a badge in the internal system of Amazon called late adopter because most of the staff who run the amzn infra did not want to upgrade anything unless there was a must (mostly security fixes)

- setting up such environments by hand is a time wasting error prone excercise. Automation is a must. I keep an Ansible repo only for the environment I need to maintain.

- using MacOS for Fortran, Matlab etc might not be the most efficient. For problematic software I usually run a virtualized Linux instance that can be snapshotted and transferred to other devices so it is super easy to replicate a complicated environment

- Docker might not cut it, we live in an era when a fully virtualized instance boots up in 3 seconds on a M1 Mac so you might as well just use a full OS instead of a container

Btw. it is a shame that software development is like this. The lack of 1.0 mindset and the continuous "improvements" that are quite often regressions and UX degradations are really annoying and mostly unnecessary. There are tiny improvements between the last 3 major OS versions from Apple.

I could not care less about new notifications (that I immediately disable after installing the new MacOS) and such features and I care deeply about being able to run my usual tools as they were running in the previous version.

[btreecat]

>- Docker might not cut it, we live in an era when a fully virtualized instance boots up in 3 seconds on a M1 Mac so you might as well just use a full OS instead of a container

This sounds like FUD to me, but then again you can't use docker with out a VM on OSX any way.

[datadeft]

Not sure which part is FUD. I use Docker since 2014, still has the little lego guy from the first conference and that sentence contains the word might, but ok.

[btreecat]

If your not confident enough in your statement to leave out such a heavy lifting qualifier like "might" you shouldn't make the claim at all.

Either make the claim and come with recipes or leave it out.

[heresie-dabord]

Setting apart the collection of specific, idiosyncratic application stacks in question here, it is frustrating to see how badly computer users are being served by the commercial operating systems. I expected APPL and MSFT to make more progress in software usability in general.

We are now in an age that I call "Abusability": How much can we insult and mistreat the customer with our unfriendly software? ^_^

> I've suggested Docker as a potential solution

I recommend Podman instead because it is compatible with Docker containers but does not require root privilege.[1]

> it still requires her to take on the role of administrator and caretaker, which, in her busy world of astrophysical research, can be quite the distraction

. . . And yet

> she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch

She is already a sysadmin. But multiply the number of machines to maintain by a factor of 1000 for an initial model of a sysadmin's real workload.

= = =

[1] _ https://podman.io/

[steve1977]

Maybe macOS is not the optimal platform for this kind of work (anymore).

I’ve relegated my Mac usage to simple web browsing and stuff like that.

[renegade-otter]

Wouldn't it be simpler to just have a 'Nix running in a VMWare Fusion? Why go through this pain?

I am on a Mac, but my work is done on a Mint.

[hobotime]

Native on apple silicon can be magical. I remember Jupyter being awesome once I found the goat to sacrifice to get it to install a few years back.

[pyridines]

If it's already a massive house of cards, setting that all up all over again might be a nightmare.

[jbverschoor]

Just run orbstack. Gives you nix or Debian. Or use a persistent docker.

[tiltowait]

I’ve found the Migration Assistant to be solid—almost fanatical—for persisting custom settings. Most recently, it carried over my non-standard OpenSSH + config with resident key support, GPG config, and a couple of other things without a hitch. I even found a few config files from 2007 and a same-era Safari SIMBL extension that probably stopped working in Snow Leopard, all faithfully migrated across five different machines and a dozen operating systems.

I’m curious what doesn’t work for her.

[mjsweet]

You know, it's probably not migration assistant. I would say it's a major OS upgrade and gets tarred with the same brush. I personally have found it to be fantastic for upgrading to new hardware.

[mise_en_place]

The state of laptop and desktop computing is abysmal. I use Ubuntu as a daily driver for desktop and macOS for my laptop, but all three major OSes, including Windows, have many issues.

Gnome is relatively stable but not foolproof, there are strange behaviors like file picker previews not working. There are services running in the background that do who knows what. I have built a custom distribution using build root, I will be attempting to use that as my daily driver.

[bloopernova]

It might not be up to her requirements, but an Ansible playbook may help. It's what we use to set up new MacBooks and only runs in localhost mode.

Ansible is fairly quick to learn, and can control homebrew so it's able to install a lot of stuff.

If you're interested, ping me and I can share some snippets. Also I bet you'll get a reply from someone evangelizing Nix ;)

EDIT: Oh, and git repo with dot files is very useful. As is homebrew bundle, which installs a list generated from a different host.

EDIT 2: oh also I just moved MacBooks last week, so a lot of this fresh in my head right now. Including cargo/rust, VSCode profiles, brew bundle, ublock origin config, backups of .envrc files, etc etc ad infinitum. My Emacs config was actually about the easiest bit to move!

[MichaelZuo]

This sounds like a lot more work then a few extra button clicks?

[dumpsterdiver]

Indeed, but when the alternative is missing critical security updates for years at a time one only needs to be bitten once to understand the value.

[MichaelZuo]

Monterey is still receiving security updates though?

[dumpsterdiver]

I’m not sure what you mean. Keeping a system updated does include updating to the latest major operating system release when an older one no longer receives security updates.

Ansible (and other provisioning solutions) could help in the case where updates break an existing workflow by attempting to put the system back into the desired state. Of course if something broke after and update there’s a chance that trying to fix it will fail, but at least it would fail loudly during the provisioning process and you’d be able to see why.

[MichaelZuo]

The alternative in this case, sticking with Monterey, means they still receive the security updates.

[bloopernova]

Less work than a week of manually doing it.

[jojobas]

The way Russians put it, "The hedgehogs cried as they prickled their skins but continued shagging the cactus".

[bjornlouser]

had to look that one up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/32x2ml/what_does_м...

[jojobas]

Yep that's the kids version about mice eating the cactus.

[coldtea]

>Each time she acquires a new Mac, she embarks on a week-long odyssey to set up her computing environment from scratch. It's not because she enjoys it; rather, it's a necessity because the built-in migration assistant just doesn't cut it for her specialised needs.

She could use a bash or zsh script, with instructions to get the apps she wants. Brew allows installing most open source apps + MAS apps you've bought + third party proprietary apps. E.g.:

  brew install --cask alfred
  brew install --cask google-chrome

(She could save those in a brew dump file from the earlier machine too and re-play it).

then she could hookup up some external disk (or use some cloud storage) and sync any settings files she has customized (.zshrc, and so on) and rsync any stuff, build some folder structure she has, etc, and copy over settings for third party apps.

With "defaults write" commands she can then set a lof of Mac preferences that she'd normally have to change on the Settings page or individual Apple apps, e.g.:

  defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool true

A new system would just need some small time to run the script to get to taste. I've been using that for years and it works great.

[thfuran]

When I was maintaining a setup script using brew a few years ago, it seemed to regularly break due to brew changing how to pin versions or something else. I just gave up and switched to Linux. Maybe brew is more stable these days.

[coldtea]

Maybe. I never pin specific versions, because for my use case (local utilities and apps) I don't care. So this is for basic system setup.

For reproducible stuff I use docker, vms, etc with pinned versions. And for sciency stuff she'll be having something similar, or at least conda and such.

[barkingcat]

Part of your story involves the point os update release where apple just straight up removed system python.

that would have been a nightmare

[pasc1878]

Not really - if you were using python heavily you would not be using Apple python but installed from python.org or Anaconda or a package manager to control what version is in use

Also Apple did give an OS release or two warning I think.

[mythhabit]

It sounds like her use case is a good candidate for containerising the data reduction pipelines. If she can get the cruft to run in a container (or a few perhaps), she has instant access to get them running on a new computer as long as Emacs is "just" the frontend.

[globular-toast]

Stuff like Emacs is the easiest to set up. I've had my emacs config in git for years like most people. I've installed it on many different systems over the years. I also have all my dotfiles in another repo.

She should really just switch to GNU/Linux, though. So much easier.

[buro9]

this is the advice I've been hearing more often than not. I've been Linux and Windows for most of my career, and only strayed into Mac a few times in the last 5 years. Without fail, _every_ Mac I've owned has needed support involvement on an OS upgrade.

when I've told people that, what I hear is "you're not supposed to update the OS on a Mac, stick with the one it shipped with and never make the major OS update as those are for newer hardware".

to me that seems illogical, wrong, worse than Windows... and yet as an observer to comments like the parent and seeing colleagues get bitten by issues, it appears to be true... the happy path with Mac OS is to never upgrade the major version

[steve1977]

The happy path with macOS is to only use hardware and apps made by Apple, I think that’s the problem.

If you stick to that, upgrades are usually pretty safe.

[vbezhenar]

This very topic is about broken grep made (or at least patched) by Apple.

[steve1977]

Hence the “usually”. And compared to the problems with 3rd party hardware and apps.

[lnxg33k1]

I am not sure how to handle this post, I guess that's the same for RHEL or LTSes, if you upgrade major OSes you might break things, stay on current versions in order to stay safe, should we freeze software because astrophysicists are too busy?

[nine_k]

A rolling Linux distro would introduce minor, easy-to-address changes every now and then. This may be less pain overall (much like making many small pull requests vs one giant rewrite).

Disclaimer: I'm running a rolling-release distro (Void) since 2016, and has gone through 5 machines with it, usually with near-zero setup after a move.

[lnxg33k1]

I also am on linux rolling, I use gentoo on desktop and arch on laptop, I update, things break, it's my fault, but would use the same approach for major non-rolling OSes updates, the point was not the amount of breakage, it's the breakage principle in itself, I am not sure why OP was blaming maintainer for breakage of major OS updates?

[garblegarble]

>This may be less pain overall (much like making many small pull requests vs one giant rewrite).

Just shows how different people are in their approaches to dependencies... I can't imagine working like that, the idea that everything I'm using could break at any moment. I'd rather deal with those (possibly larger in number at one time) set of changes at fixed upgrade intervals, in exchange for having a stable system.

[nine_k]

A stream of small changes is easier to migrate automatically, so you rarely see a need to update something by hand.

But when you do, the change is small, so you do your adaptation in 5-10 minutes, and continue with your day.

This is in stark contrast with upgrading from an LTS version, when the changes are sometimes drastic, and the changes are everywhere, so it takes some time to even figure out where to start. Because of that, such upgrades may be postponed, snowballing out of hand. I have a box that still runs old-old-oldstable Debian because of that.

A rolling release avoids this, while also bringing you fresh software faster. I get new releases of Gimp or Emacs within a week, and of Firefox, or stuff like git, usually next day.

[lnxg33k1]

I have a system that is rolling doesnt mean i work on rolling, that’s why virtualisation exist, i develop in containers that represent preference of clients

[dclowd9901]

I don’t understand why they can’t suitably migrate things so they don’t break. They have kernel access to the system. It should be trivial to move whatever around that needs to be moved to carry on functionality.

I suspect it’s because they actually don’t know _what_ will break with what they change.

[lnxg33k1]

I think either of us misunderstood, I understood that the wife wanted the update to don’t trigger any changes to their existing tools, you said that it should be trivial to move stuff around, implying that some change would be needed, that is according to what i got, the point OP was complaining about? I agree with you anyway, at least mostly, should be trivial or not, I wonder how many people have a look at changelogs before updating and then go to blogs to complain, I dont use osx as a linux user, when i see something of interest in update packages i go to check the changelogs to make sure its smooth and almost never anything happen, so I don’t have much to complain

[steve1977]

With the difference that major LTS upgrades happen much less frequently than major macOS upgrades.

[balves]

Nix-darwin seems like a solution worth looking into for this.

[JCharante]

Ideally she would have the dependencies written down. How else are people supposed to replicate her work?

[adastra22]

Nobody replicates work in these fields in that way.

Most of the time people just don’t replicate work, full stop. In the rare instances that they do, replicating the analysis from scratch is the whole point. Running the same script and getting the same result is not interesting.

[blablabla123]

While the macOS updates itself work quite well for me, e.g. I also didn't mind the 64 bit-only that much, anything relying on XCode command line tools is quite a pain. First I need to fight through the inconsistent warnings that the version is out-of-date/not installed and eventually find a Stackoverflow post which describes how to fix that. Afterwards a few other fixes are needed. I worked around it by relying more on Homebrew (which needs the occasional symlink fix) and limiting the number of tools I build myself. Still quite frustrating, I'll definitely switch back to Linux once my laptop won't get anymore security updates.

I realize Nix is also an option but the user land version is much more rudimentary than NixOS' - which already requires expert level knowledge of the package management for everyday chores.

[complex_pi]

To all who suggest nix or docker or whatever. Please consider that it should not be necessary in the first place. 20 years ago Apple advertised its laptops as "real Unix on your laptop" which rightly appealed to a lot of scientists

It is fair from the user to expect some stability here.

[lycopodiopsida]

And it delivered - it is a real, as in "certified" unix. You are making here some assumptions about rate of updates, innovation and disruptions which have nothing to do with being a unix or unix-like and were never promised by apple as such.

I've done scientific work on a mac, and it was fine, now I am doing SWE work on a mac and it is fine, too. Such fragile setups would not survive most linux distro updates, the only advantage is that you could find a distro with a very low rate of innovation and thus a very long support window and call it day. But it is, obviously, not a viable choice for apple.

[yakubin]

> But it is, obviously, not a viable choice for apple.

It's not obvious to me. Apple used to release 1 version of MacOS every 1.5-2.5 years[1]. Now it releases 1 every 11 months. And it's not like the recent versions have some groundbreaking innovations in them. Nobody cares about MacOS upgrades outside of worrying about breakage, or getting a recent enough XCode to target newer iPhones.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases>

[lycopodiopsida]

"groundbreaking innovation" is mostly "stuff I need" on HN. MacOS has a lot of groundbreaking innovation in it, alone the level of integration with Handoff between different devices is best in class. At the same time, apple is not living in a vacuum like a linux distro, but has to synchronize features between different device classes - it drives an ecosystem, not a macOS distribution.

>Nobody cares about MacOS upgrades

Speak for yourself. Many people do, for the rest, there is debian stable and RHEL.

[yakubin]

> Many people do

Geeks who update everything every 15 minutes and actively follow tech news. Just like there exist people who buy a different set of clothes every season. It seems to me that in the past with the slower release cycle MacOS was more polished and people actually could differentiate between releases. Now most people won’t be even able to tell which one they’re using, and which release is more recent than another.

> for the rest, there is debian stable and RHEL.

Last time I checked RHEL is not an LTS version of MacOS.

[lycopodiopsida]

Last time I checked no one promised and sold an LTS version of macos ever. If you are in a possession of such a contract I suggest to make a claim by apple.

[m463]

I have slowly moved to macos as my "front end" to all the other machines.

[flemhans]

I, too, decided to skip on macOS upgrades for the lifespan of the hardware. But I tend to buy a Mac every 2-3 years so it's just a few skips.

[prmoustache]

She looks to be the perfect candidate for RedHat Enterprise Linux instead.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

You mean Rocky Linux, no?

[prmoustache]

It depends what she wants. If she wants to be able to open a ticket and have knowledgeable people answering I would say RedHat is a good candidate. If she just want stability maybe she can get away with Almalinux or Rocky but it is still to be tested how they will manage long term support vs stability.

[rurban]

No, better use the real thing

[jiveturkey]

> she tends to stick with the pre-installed OS

That's not a great idea security-wise. Apple has formally committed to only updating the latest major version for security fixes. Of course, they have backported some fixes, but even in early 2023 those backports were highly delayed and incomplete.

If you're talking 7-8 years (and the hardware is certainly good for that long) of still using the OS as shipped, I feel like that is a mistake. The most painful updates are when they do the very large refactors, like Mojave->Catalina, then Catalina->Bug Sir. I am guessing whatever comes after Sonoma will be a biggie also.

I am still on Catalina for my media server. I don't dare update it. But it's not connected to Internet.

[bakugo]

> That's not a great idea security-wise.

Unfortunately, a computer that doesn't do whatever you need it to do is useless, regardless of how "secure" it is.

[kilpikaarna]

This.

I personally like (older, 2010-2015) Apple hardware because it's sturdy, looks pretty nice, generally holds up over time, their touchpads and keyboards are the best I've found on laptops, shopping for new-to-me hardware is easy (and cheap) because of the limited model range and everymac.com, etc. Unfortunately the repairability went down for a good while, and build quality took a nosedive with the butterfly keyboards etc. The Apple Silicon machines seem nice, but there's even less upgrade possibilities than my 2014 MacBook Air, that at least has replaceable storage. How well they will hold up over time (decade-plus) is unknown still.

Catalina is about the newest OS any of my Macs will run. Still using Mojave, however, since I want to keep using my old paid-for (no scammy SaaS, which neither want or can afford) copy of Adobe CS3, which needs Carbon. Even by Mojave, it seems to me Apple had been locking the OS down and nerfing the Unix features way past the point of diminishing returns and into decline. It seems to only have gotten way worse since then.

So all in all, living with an "insecure" operating system seems like the lesser evil. I use an up to date browser (although it's only a matter of time before those are no longer available, I guess), browse from behind a Firewall + NAT if possible, make regular backups and keep an eye out for suspicious looking processes or ones using a lot of CPU or battery. The risks/drawbacks honestly seem pretty theoretical compared to the very practical drawbacks of trying to stay current. And I'm not even counting the monetary outlay of trying to stay current.

"Bug Sir" is such a great typo.

edit: Forgot that in addition to Adobe CS3 I also have a copy of MS Office 2011, that I found boxed at a flea market for the price of one month of o365 or something.

[dylan604]

>Catalina->Bug Sir

Was that intentional or freudian?

[mbrumlow]

Just use Nix.

I have my entire Mac setup in a single set of declarative files, including custom compile of Emacs ans all of my config.

It takes maybe 20 minutes to have a new Mac up and running. 10 if on fast internet.

[nicbou]

I have a Settings folder for this. It includes a Brewfile and a lot of other configs. It cut down that setup time to under a day

[kazinator]

Sounds like Apple is cribbing from the Debian playbook.