nixOS or homebrew for macOS package management?

Cromulent · 1 Apr 2022 at 13:00

I know homebrew is the more popular of the two, but you can do some cool stuff with nixOS and was wondering if anyone had tried both and which they preferred and why?

HACO · 1 Apr 2022 at 13:08

Gave nix a try and didn't find a lot of issues, but reverted back to homebrew just because it's the standard package manager you see in guides, and it's more of a macOS first package manager than nix.

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2022 at 13:12

I use Homebrew. As above, pretty much every guide/blog/article will be using Homebrew in their instructions.

NickK · 2 Apr 2022 at 09:18

I learnt long-time ago package management and OSX don't mix. Instead I use a VM and run a linux variant on that using VirtualBox.

HACO · 2 Apr 2022 at 09:48

NickK said:
I learnt long-time ago package management and OSX don't mix. Instead I use a VM and run a linux variant on that using VirtualBox.

It's come a very long way. Linux is still nicer of course but with migration to ARM you're more likely to find ARM versions of the typical tools in brew rather than typical linux repositories (although that has also got much better in the last 2 years due to ARM gaining market share in the enterprise/datacentre market).

And since Virtualbox is not releasing ARM virtualisation on macOS, as of now the free mac virtualisation tools are quite poor.

NickK · 2 Apr 2022 at 10:57

HACO said:
It's come a very long way. Linux is still nicer of course but with migration to ARM you're more likely to find ARM versions of the typical tools in brew rather than typical linux repositories (although that has also got much better in the last 2 years due to ARM gaining market share in the enterprise/datacentre market).

And since Virtualbox is not releasing ARM virtualisation on macOS, as of now the free mac virtualisation tools are quite poor.

True- although linux ARM support has been heavily driven initially by RasberryPI et al and IOT embedded systems. The more desktop user-centric will start to move further with apple's own ARM chip but as others like Google etc will start supporting vendors with both Intel and ARM in the application area (rather than just the GoogleOS/Chrome/Compile your own).