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by cosmic_cheese 400 days ago
That’s still more to remember than `x install y`, which might sound trivial but that’s the exact kind of friction that impedes adoption.

Maybe it would make sense for nix to add a mode that basically aliases that first command to `nix install <package>`.
2 comments
lambdaba 400 days ago
Yeah, I'm just addressing you specifically, you could switch easily and Nix has a much larger package selection (outside of GUI apps on macOS). And it immediately can do more via nix-shell -p, which can be also be used as shebang.

But yeah, Nix is much more than a homebrew replacement and that has its downsides.

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verdverm 400 days ago
Nix may have a larger selection, but I sampled a few of the projects I install from homebrew and...

1. Did't actually exist

2. Outdated version

3. Incorrect build

I'll keep the quality of Homebrew packages over the quantity in Nix

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lambdaba 400 days ago
I'm curious of what the packages are because I only have ~10 packages that I use from homebrew, either very Mac-specific or that have better packaging (ffmpeg, mpv)
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verdverm 399 days ago
They are all projects that distribute Go binaries on GitHub and have official homebrew taps

The 2/3 that are on nix are both out of date and created by some outside party.

I do not see a world where I provide nix stuff for my projects. There are already too many packages managers and I'm not spending my unpaid time to support all of them. GitHub and brew are my limit, def not learning nix just for this

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spacedcowboy 400 days ago
Not going to list them all, but...

@M4MBP ~ % brew list | wc -l

149

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troupo 400 days ago
Some/many of those are likely to be dependencies. For example, it shows openssl@1.1 and openssl@3 on my machine
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spacedcowboy 398 days ago
Right, but I don't think that's the issue.

If the complaint is that other systems are less up-to-date than brew is, then the number of things installed is still the issue - whether they're dependencies or not.

Unless, of course, the other system manages dependencies differently, say it compiles in static versions of required libraries at build-time, or divides them up into fewer dependent packages.

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mbirth 399 days ago
`brew leaves` will show manually installed packages.
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drcongo 400 days ago
That's essentially what Devbox does for you as a package manager, a hand wrapper around nix for using nix just for its package ecosystem.
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lambdaba 400 days ago
Oh yeah, I knew about devbox but hadn't seen (perhaps it's new) that it can handle global packages: https://www.jetify.com/docs/devbox/devbox_global/
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