[KingMob]

I tried nix-darwin for a year, eventually declared nix bankruptcy, and settled on mise.

mise does 90% of what I need, but at only 1% of the hassle.

I like the idea of nix, and the future of building software is clearly something like it... I'm just not sure it'll be nix itself.

[felixyz]

I've seen several Mac users have the same experience: going all-in on nix-darwin and then getting frustrated. But nix-darwin is one of the worst ways of getting into Nix, because its goal is to make your whole macOS system configurable with Nix, but macOS is a moving target and (unlike Linux) not built to be modular at all. I know people put a lot of hard work into nix-darwin, but it's simply not the main focus of Nix as a whole and sadly it might not ever become a seamless experience. (I'm not a mac user so not keeping up, but I do see colleagues trying it out from time to time.)

The solution here is: use Nix but don't use nix-darwin (at least not until you're generally comfortable with Nix for package management and dev shells). You do NOT have to use nix-darwin on Mac to reap 80% of the benefits of Nix (especially in a team setting).

After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling. I just had a new team member onboard, knowing nothing about Nix, in a day or less, with several different languages and unusual tools.

[KingMob]

> After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling

Ahh, but I tried that too. I originally decided to play with nix-darwin because I was on a contract that used nix in their repos to ease onboarding of academic collaborators.

In practice, it was complicated enough that most of us ended up relying on the 2 nix experts to make any real changes, and when they left, the nix configs stagnated.

It might be the case that nix-darwin, and our particular python/ML repos, were "hard mode" for nix, but I truly think I gave it a fair shake.

If nix requires a lot of effort to do anything off the beaten path, it's just not the tool for me.

[jrop]

To be clear, I don't try to Nix-everything. I just use it to 1) install a bunch of CLI tools to my nix-env, and 2) dev-shells. That's pretty much it, though. Even that is a huge boon. Even so, I'm keeping an eye on mise, for sure.