nix-on-droid VS nix-darwin

If you do like the nix ecosystem (and all its benefits like reproducible envs) or just want to give it a try to a "NixOS" like thingy, you should absolutely try https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid. It's somewhat rough, but it's very nice and has nix flakes and home-manager support.

I doubt your setup needed recompiling the Nix binary itself at any point. Even I did that more out of love of adventure than for any practical reasons, it’s just that the scars are still there.

And you know what, the evaluation time thing might just be a bug. Or at least I don’t see any other reason why (e.g.) `nix-shell -p yt-dlp` in my Nix-on-Droid[1] installation works reasonably fast but `nix shell nixpkgs#yt-dlp` takes minutes.

[1] https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid

It is the Nix tool but on Android. It's kinda in the name and on the GitHub.

t184256/nix-on-droid

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.