nix-darwin VS NUR

Just a shout out to nix-darwin[1]. It is nix, so initial setup is a bit involved. But then it truly makes it easy to configure everything in one place including mac defaults, homebrew apps declaratively and mas apps etc.

There is a sample config in nix-darwin repo[2].

[1] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

[2] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/examp...

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/tree/master/modules

nix-darwin does similar thing for MacOS

You can use https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

There are many threads around where you can learn more about this (and why it's complicated...), but https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/1341 and https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/issues/139 seem like two of the most comprehensive.

Nix is pretty usable for both desktops and headless servers. Personally, I even use it on macOS without much trouble.

My system looks like any other install of Ventura, but all of my configuration, ranging from the terminal and VS Code to macOS-specific system preferences and Safari, is done declaratively in Nix [1]. The overwhelming majority of my installed software also comes from Nix packages, with some exceptions for stuff that is not packaged yet (e.g., I have Podman Desktop, the macOS ZFS port, Lulu, yubikey-manager-qt installed through Homebrew -- fortunately nix-darwin [2] also just lets me have an set of brews/casks in my config).

It was been a bit of a nightmare at first since the error messages are kind of horrific, and there can be a lack of good examples/docs on flakes. But I think the weekend worth of time I invested was worth it since I no longer need to rely on hacky shellscripts or remember to manually configure anything.

[1]: <https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager>

[2]: <https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin>

Take a look at nix-darwin, this is what I use. It allows you to configure your system similar to NixOS including globally installed programs.

This — I still use mas and brew —-cask through the nix-darwin module, though. It’s not exactly reproducible, but it’s at least closer to reproducible and declarative.

So first, I'm a bit confused about AUR. I'm not aware of what you're describing. I heard about AUR-like repo for Nix (called NUR https://github.com/nix-community/NUR).

You need to use nur

Hi, I'm the author of the PR :) I uploaded it to NUR precisely so that it would be available sooner. However, as I wrote in the thread yesterday, as of this PR one of the components the package was relying on was deprecated. I'm still trying to make it work again using the new buildFHSEnv. However, if you're running 22.11 or haven't updated your local version of nixpkgs beyond that PR, it should still work.

Apart from nixpkgs having many packages, there is also NUR which has even more stuff.

You might also want to publish your sarc utility on NUR, https://nur.nix-community.org/

nur = import (builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/nix-community/NUR/archive/master.tar.gz") {

Nix also has the NUR. I have never needed to use it, while when I used arch I had many AUR packages.

Follow the NUR installation instructions and it should be in pkgs.nur.repos.arc.packages.nvidia-patch.

As for the community repo, there's nur but only 120 people use it.. I think the reason nixpkgs is so big is that the community is pretty accepting of accepting loads of different packages.

Some common options for the first: - your own git repo - your own flake (a specially constructed and easy to consume git repo) - something like NUR