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Comment by vegabook | Hacker News Reader

Yeah once you've used Nix[OS] and home-manager, it's hard to go back to apt or brew or the dreaded "sudo make install" without feeling like you need to have a shower afterwards. And I was a loyal Ubuntu person for like 15 years. It's especially true if you're a dev installing and uninstalling all day long.

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With homebrew, you can have Brewfile that can serve as declarative source of truth.

I try to install all software via homebrew, mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/), and scoop (https://scoop.sh/), and setting up a new machine now takes me minutes. Meanwhile I don't need to deal with Nix language.

> With homebrew, you can have Brewfile that can serve as declarative source of truth.

for homebrew, while Nix configuration is for everything. I never used a Brewfile before, so looked at https://github.com/Lissy93/Brewfile/blob/master/Brewfile but it just looks like a list of packages. What about the configuration for those packages? Or your own custom patches for them? Runtime parameters? Environment variables?

There is so much more going on in the typical developer environment that it doesn't seem like (to me, an uneducated fool) Brewfile would be enough to actually serve as a declarative source of truth, except for Homebrew-specific things.

Versions? Compatibilities? Just pulling latest doesn't cut it.

It has a really good story here imo! Pin nixpkgs to a commit with the version you need, it will pull and use the compatible deps even if you have those deps in different versions being used elsewhere.

I think they were continuing my earlier questions, ie they're asking about those things in Homebrew/Brewfile like I did with my other questions.

Yes

Brewfile is definitely the best option when in that ecosystem, but even that falls short by having no explicit versioning. You have to hack in version pinning if you run into an issue with a specific package.

If you like mise, check out devenv for the nix version of it. Its a lot of the nix benefits without a lot of the nix drawbacks (but still some)

It's a crazy drug because there's a lot of significant downsides to Nix[OS]. E.g. it took me a solid half an hour of focus to upgrade my config to 25.11[1]. Also, like, no Secure Boot. And I've had to reverse engineer a lot of stuff.

But like you said, I can't ever imagine going back. Once you're over the learning curve (and... yeah, that learning curve) the upside are just so huge. Nothing compares, at all.

Part of me wonders if maybe one day a bootc-based framework will offer something like 20% of the benefits of NixOS with only 10% of the downsides. But other than that, we're totally stuck with Nix forever. (And once I had switched to bootc, I bet my next thought would be "I should find a way to generate this config from Nix"...).

[1] I have a very complex config so this may be an extreme case. On the other hand, everything about Nix is basically designed as an invitation to create an extremely complex config.

It has been a game changer for me at least as a first time dev to just run 'nix develop' and have 'cargo build' just work as a declare all the depends, options and such in my flake.nix. You can do the same with 'shell.nix' files so without flakes.

agreed. Github should make the inclusion of a flake.nix mandatory lol

That would be a game changer I think.

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