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Comment by jherdman | Hacker News Reader

Something not mentioned here is that each and every single macOS update will break your Nix install too. This is, by far, the most frustrating part of using Nix on macOS.

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This is true, but in my experience it has mostly been pretty easy to deal with. Generally it's just a matter of re-linking /etc/zprofile and friends to the ones from the nix-darwin installer (if you're using nix-darwin, which I would recommend).

Could you elaborate on what broke when you updated macOS? Granted, my Nix installation is a single-user installation (so it doesn't have the edited /etc/bashrc and /etc/zshrc that get overridden), but it worked without any issues after I updated from Big Sur to Monterey, so I'm curious about your experience.

The only things that broke for me after the update were the xcode command-line tools, which break for everyone[1].

[1](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32893412/command-line-to...)

I imagine GP is talking about every macOS update forcibly overwriting /etc/zshrc.

They bothered writing a system capable of dropping the conflicted file in Relocated Items for us to optionally use--but they appear to be only using it for /etc/bashrc, and not /etc/zshrc. So, people who use zsh by choice or default get dumped on a bit :/

Some background in https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/3616

This hasn't been true in my experience. I've been running Nix on macOS for nearly a year without problems.

I was surprised recently when upgrading from Catalina to Monterey and all the nix stuff just kept working. It was the first time a major macOS hasn’t broken nix.

Does anyone know if this update was a fluke?

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