nix-darwin VS nixos-hardware

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.

Always useful to look at the seemingly endless stream of Linux information, the Arch wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_ROG_Zephyrus_G14_(2022...

Also NixOS has a nixos-hardware repository with configurations for some laptops:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/asus/zep...

Reasonably legible if you ever programmed anything

{ imports = [ # Include the results of the hardware scan. ./hardware-configuration.nix # Additional hardware specific configuration # https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware ];

You could try this repo for hardware support on various laptops if yours is on it: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

Btw, for starters, I think you can learn a lot by checking other's configurations and from things like https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware. There are a lot of useful/essential configurations that are not enabled by default.

in that case do note that this module assumes you use nixos-hardware, otherwise you can remove lines 161-165. I can also send you my VM's libvirtd .xml file when you get around to creating it.

My computer is a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with a dual GPU setup (AMD iGPU + Nvidia DGPU) where I'm using a "hybrid mode" configuration provided by nixos-hardware, using PRIME offload.

Not too long ago nixos-hardware changed the default Xorg driver for AMD to modesetting from amdgpu.