Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve been using Nix on a couple of my Macs, including on an M1, and I’ve cutdown my dependence on homebrew almost to the point of its absence; I rely more on Nix packages, than on Homebrew packages.
Having said that, I still wouldn’t recommend anyone using Nix; steep learning curve, and too many rough edges.
I'd like to think there are roughly two camps of people:
Those who hear about Nix's declarative nature, with its reproducible/'pure' nature, and generational installation, all of which allow for some pretty neat UX. To this group, Nix sounds technically interesting.
The other group, those who want a tool that just works, that's simple to use, and already get their job done with other package managers. -- I think for this group, Nix is going to be a bad tool to recommend, even if they keep hearing about how neat Nix is.
Rather. Nix is wonderful 95% of the time. But the 5% of the time you run into some problem, it's much more difficult to get unstuck compared to other tools. (Other knowledge is necessary but not sufficient, the community is small so maybe harder to find a StackOverflow post, the documentation is fragmented, etc.).
I am not sure what is the story of having NixOS as a server, but would not suggest to have it as a main OS. There a sometime cases when there are simply no package you want to install, or you install it but some functionality doesn't work. Yes, maybe one can fix/patch, but I simply fall back to apt-get in such cases, and don't spend my time on that. Usually I have problems like this with GUI application, ie: installed pdf editor, which can open pdf, but can highliting functionality doesn't work and the crashes.
This was what I thought when I was learning nix. Once I used NixOS, I realised it's not quite that difficult. -- The two big differences: 1. Roughly, you only really need to care about the NixOS config about as frequently as you'd change system files in /etc/ in other Linux distributions. 2. Some programs (e.g. minikube) will download a binary automatically, and this doesn't work well with NixOS.
I've seen tools like distrobox https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox recommended as backups on NixOS, as well as the usual Docker / VMs.
I secretly suspect some of the reason NixOS is popular is it's less trouble than nix on non-NixOS. Whereas, nix on macOS, I've sometimes mixed compilers/libraries, which leads to difficult to discern problems.
I _really_ like being able to drop into a shell with a few additional packages installed. But nix does have a learning curve and some rough edges. I found it tricky to use things like libraries outside of nix's build process. And there is a bit of an impedance mismatch when trying to use languages that have their own package management.
So I've got nix for a bunch of software, a couple of libraries in homebrew, and native package management for various languages (cargo, ghcup, lake, idris).
I also reluctantly installed agda via homebrew because I can't get it to build. (Haskell mostly works on M1).
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Sadly, it's not quite there for my needs, but it's getting better. Flakes are more fleshed out, the CLI is improving in it's user experience. I still don't feel like I understand the language works and build my flakes off of copying/pasting the one that works.
What are the advantages of that?