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Comment by mjhoy | Hacker News Reader

1 — Sure. But Nix isn't exactly the most friendly package manager to begin with. I wouldn't recommend it if you're not comfortable creating volumes.

2 — Could you explain? Mine is on and working, I didn't need to do anything else.

3 — Is this if you have login items that need nix to be available? I don't have this so I haven't noticed.

4 — I've never run into this, but again I might just not use Nix for the kind of things that would cause issues.

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It's not that installing Nix is impossible on macOS, it's just that it has some hard-to-ignore limitations now.

1. Having to create a volume when a plain old directory should suffice is insane. It's creating a hassle for no good reason for users.

2. /nix would be unencrypted by default if kept in a separate volume. There's also the problem of how to unlock it upon boot.

3. Login items is a very common use case so not supporting it would be problematic for many users.

4. Unreliable sleep is an even bigger problem.

I believe Nix actually picks a volume so that it can be encrypted, and it uses one of the many ways to run a script before login (some of which still happen to work) to decrypt it?

It's still problematic because that can only happen late in the login process.

I read that thread a couple weeks back (was doing some firmlink research and stumbled upon it) and I seem to recall someone there finding something that ran pretty early. Perhaps I'm misremembering? I am sure there is at least one way to get this done, but I'll have to go look into what it is.

Thanks for explaining! It sounds like I am just lucky with my set up not to run into issues. Hopefully they come up with a solution soon.

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