nix-installer VS osxfuse

This is a way improved[1] version of the official installer, capable of uninstallation among many other things, there is no need to use the official one: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer

1: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer?tab=read...

The Determinate Systems nix installer is quite smooth: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/

Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.

and that's just the simple version, on Linux, and thus is likely the happy-path in CI.

When trying to use it locally on macOS, this here is just some "you wanna do _what_?!": https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/tree/v0.... (not to pick on determinate.systems, the upstream is similarly facepalm: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-... )

I installed nix with the following nix-installer: bash curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install Now I'm trying to install home-manager and I'm starting from 3.2 Standalone setup with the following command: bash nix run home-manager/master -- init --switch but it gives me the following error message: Could not find suitable profile directory, tried /home/tornax/.local/state/home-manager/profiles and /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/tornax

Alternatively the Determinate Systems Nix installer runs on Steamdeck. They even have instructions for setting up a Steamdeck VM where you can try out anything before buying (other than running games).

Nice write up. But my question would be why not just use the Determinate Systems Nix installer to install nix? Is there a specific reason you went with Guix?

Personally, I like using this alternate installer. I find it a bit easier to work with. https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

You should be able to install both in a container and on the host. And for the install script, no idea why it doesn't work for you, but there's also an unofficial installer you could try: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

I've installed Nix on macOS using nix-installer. Now I can start a temporary nix shell using nix-shell -p git direnv as an example, but I need both of these packages "globally" outside of a nix-shell. How do I do this on macos?

Install macFUSE, thank me later: https://osxfuse.github.io

I didn't exactly use any 'tutorial'. Assumming you can already SSH to the target machine, you just need to install both these pkgs then reboot to 1TR Recovery Mode and choosing Reduced Security and choose to enable Kernel Extension and then reboot again goto Security & Privacy and Allow the extension, and that's it you can now use it.

Yeah, FUSE is Linux only. But for completeness, for macs there is macFUSE, and for Windows there is winfsp. Both of these have fewer filesystems than FUSE, and I've used neither so I don't know how well they work.

https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/List-of-macFUSE-File...

https://winfsp.dev/doc/Known-File-Systems/

Weird. Where did you download (lat/new)est MacFuse from? https://osxfuse.github.io/ I hope!

I lead a project that included shipping a filesystem driver and a virtual disk on Windows.

What I did to learn the lower-level APIs, and perform initial testing on the driver, was write a "mirror" drive. The user-mode code pointed to a folder on disk, the driver made a virtual disk drive, and all reads and writes in the virtual disk drive went to the mirror folder.

On Windows, you can implement something like that using Dokany, Dokan, or Winfsp. On linux, there's the Fuse API. On Mac, there's MacFUSE.

Even if you don't do a "mirror" drive, understanding the callbacks that libraries like Dokany, Dokan, Winfsp, and Fuse do helps you understand how IO happens in the driver. Many IO methods provided in popular languages provide abstractions above what the OS does. (For example, the Windows kernel has no concept of the "Stream" that's in your C# program. The "Stream"'s Position property is purely a construct within the .Net framework.)

https://dokan-dev.github.io/

https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

https://osxfuse.github.io/

Another place to start is the OS's documentation itself. For example, you can start with Window's CreateFileA function. This typically is what gets called "under the hood" in most programming languages when you open or create a file: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...

"FUSE-T is a kext-less implementation of FUSE for macOS that uses NFS v4 local server instead of a kernel extension. The main motivation for this project is to replace macfuse (https://osxfuse.github.io/) that implements its own kext to make fuse work. With each version of macOS it's getting harder and harder to load kernel extensions. Apple strongly discourages it and, for this reason, software distributions that include macfuse are very difficult to install. Additionally, the macfuse kext is unstable, may cause frequent system crashes and kernel lock-ups. Given those limitations many software publishers are unable to use macfuse anymore. FUSE-T doesn't make use of kernel extension, it implements its own userspace server that converts between FUSE protocol and NFS calls and let macOS mount NFS volume instead of a kernel filesystem."

MacFuse (ntfs-3g) and a Foolproof way of getting it working via Homebrew.

macos doesn’t support many Linux file system formats. You’ll have to use something like macFUSE https://osxfuse.github.io/