Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?
All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point.
Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited.
Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly.
I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli.
Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
When you have some time might be worth it to start over. Don't use brew to install/manage your python, try it like how I wrote.
I never used brew to install or manage my python precisely because it gave me so many issues.
I’m constantly fighting Brew on all three computers where Brew is installed. Yes, I have wiped them, the problem is Brew, it is not the particular installation. If it were a problem with one particular installation of Brew, then it would not suddenly become a problem on a new fresh install of Brew.
The idea that you would need to wipe anything to start over is just bizarre to me in the first place. One of the many problems with Brew. Brew is extremely slow and it is prone to doing things that I do not want it to do without explaining why it is doing them or how I can alter its behavior (why is it installing package X? why is it updating right now?). Sometimes when I install a package, I get a spurious failure, and I need to re-run the installation command. Sometimes I just want to install one package, but it goes through “brew update”—which is extremely slow.
EDIT: I doubt your question is in good faith considering the 'cult' comment, but to answer your question at face value regarding benefit the first one that comes to mind is being able to have multiple versions of the same package and being able to rollback to previous versions if something breaks. This also means you can have package A depend on package B v1, and package C depend on package B v2, and both can coexist. If this is not something that's valuable to you, that's fine too. The other killer feature is being able to install dependencies for a project/repository if it uses nix - just clone, cd, and run `nix develop` and you'll have all the dependencies available.
Yes, I understand the multiple versions of the same package thing - Go/Rust have package managers that quite reliably solve that problem. Pipx also to a certain extent solves that problem.
Brew is useful mostly for casks (browsers, mac apps, fonts) which don't usually call for multiple versions.
I'm sure it is a hairy problem for some combination of languages/tools but I guess I'm somehow completely side stepping it. Perhaps I'm more likely to encounter it if I treated my laptop as a server because that seems more like where Nix might shine as a sort of ansible/chef/puppet on steroids ;)
# search for a package called `foo`
nix search nixpkgs foo
# install package foo, user-wide
nix-env -i foo
You can also test-drive a package without committing to it, e.g. you want to try the program `cowsay` but only want to use it once:
nix-shell -p cowsay
cowsay
exit