That's pretty cool that it can install Homebrew packages. Can anyone speak to how well that actually works in practice?
My biggest annoyance is that Homebrew is really slow; the Homebrew part of my Nix-Darwin rebuilds usuay takes 3-5x as long as everything else combined. Homebrew is really slow even when it has nothing to do.
The only caveat worth mentioning is that the module built into Nix-Darwin doesn't support installing Homebrew itself. Instead you tell it the prefix for an existing Homebrew installation.
(There is an out-of-tree module for installing Homebrew as well, but I haven't tried it.)
https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/230a197063de9287128e...
and
https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/230a197063de9287128e...
By default, brew commands run manually do still perform the automatic updates, though. That can be disabled with the following Nix-Darwin option: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/#opt-homebrew.global.a...
The other problem is that each brew invocation is slow, and I have to invoke it twice before I can even call that script, due to some quirks of how my Homebrew prefix is set up.
Idk, maybe I'll just... not. I'm not currently actually using any KDE apps on Mac.
Having nix-darwin uninstall brews not declared in the flake makes me stay honest about keeping my configuration up to date as well, if I've just `brew install x` to try something it'll get removed next time I apply my config. Needs adding to the flake to keep it installed persistently, which in turn means my config tends to be up to date.
Note that you don't need nix-darwin to achieve that. I keep my homebrew stuff separate from nix but still "keep myself honest" with this:
HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 /opt/homebrew/bin/brew bundle --file="$HOME/Brewfile" --cleanup --no-upgrade