[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.