| 27 Oct 2025 |
 emily | though it has stalled out a bunch in the past so don't know if it's available yet | 22:51:26 |
| emily | Nix also ships its own installer (it's just a fair bit worse, doesn't support uninstallations etc.) | 22:51:38 |
| emily | (it's also possible to use the Lix installer and then configure Nix in your nix-darwin configuration, FWIW) | 22:51:58 |
 Alex Nicolaou | A new fork otehr than Lix you mean? | 22:52:05 |
| Alex Nicolaou | I was making hte assumption that since Lix is a fork of the determinate installer, it too wouldn't allow upstream. (Lix is what I'm currently using) | 22:52:25 |
| emily | I mean that it is a fork of the Determinate Systems installer to install (unforked) Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/experimental-nix-installer | 22:52:58 |
| emily | the Lix installer is presumably not going to pull in any changes related to Determinate (since the idea is for it to install Lix), I imagine the Lix installer and experimental-nix-installer will just end up hard forks of the DetSys installer if they're not already | 22:53:43 |
| emily | I'm guessing using the Lix installer to install Nix is not supported (though probably mostly works?), but it is possible to use it to install Lix to bootstrap a nix-darwin configuration that uses Nix | 22:54:13 |
| emily | (because nix-darwin takes over management of the Nix installation based on nix.package anyway) | 22:54:21 |
| Alex Nicolaou | so if you were setting up a new system you'd use the new (possibly stalled) fork or you'd use lix? | 22:54:29 |
| Alex Nicolaou | (My understanding is that it's this exact think - nix-darwin managing nix - that won't bepossible when determinate drops upstream support) | 22:55:05 |
| emily | to be clear… the installer, and the forks of installers, are separate from forks of Nix | 22:55:42 |
| emily | I happen to use Lix on my systems (installed with the Lix installer), but nix-darwin also supports Nix (and even Determinate Nix, with reduced functionality) | 22:56:04 |
| emily | you need some kind of Nix installed to bootstrap nix-darwin, but once you have nix-darwin configured, it manages the Nix daemon and command line tool using nix.package | 22:56:26 |
| emily | choices the Determinate Systems installer makes has no effect on that – it just means that you won't be able to use that installer to get a Nix to install nix-darwin with. | 22:57:02 |
 samasaur | https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin/issues/1588 is our technically-not-tracking tracking issue | 23:26:39 |
| 28 Oct 2025 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Thanks for your response, sorry for being MIA. This underscores some deep misunderstanding of mine :( - I thought I'd installed Nix with the Lix installer, but didn't realize that Lix was also a fork of Nix itself. Does nix-darwin manage lix, then, and so that's the preferred configuration? | 03:37:02 |
| Alex Nicolaou | I am not in fact running Lix - nix says it's v2.28.1 | 03:37:33 |
| emily | nix-darwin will manage either of Nix or Lix (and any available version) depending on what nix.package is set to – by default it's pkgs.nix, the default Nix version in Nixpkgs | 03:42:19 |
| Alex Nicolaou | so to be sure I understand ,nix-darwin cannot manage determinate nix, but it can manage vanilla nix, or the lix fork of nix. And my choices are to use the lix installer to install lix or nix, or to use the other installer to install nix, but not the determinate installer? | 03:46:27 |
| Alex Nicolaou | mm reading more carefully it sounds like I shouldn't install nix with lix, but I could install lix with lix installer and then have nix-darwin take over and use nix packages. | 03:47:53 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Looking at my notes, that is waht I've been doing so far (using lix to install nix) | 03:49:59 |
| emily | I think your best bet right now is to use the Determinate Systems installer for Nix, and the Lix installer for Lix, but hopefully by the time the DetSys installer removes support for vanilla Nix they'll have managed to ship their own installer fork | 03:51:55 |
| Alex Nicolaou | How much am I at risk by following my own notes? Last time I set up a new system was in August, no issues — using the lix installer to install nix, and then running nix run nix-darwin/master#darwin-rebuild — switch | 03:56:51 |
| Alex Nicolaou | the reason I ask is that the nix-darwin page itself says that I won't be able to manage nix if I installit with det's installer | 03:57:11 |
| Alex Nicolaou | is that information incorrect or am I msireading it? | 03:57:18 |
| Alex Nicolaou | well I see technically it says with the dterminate flag. but that is the default now, so perhaps you're saying use some other flag to make the determinate installer install nix instead. | 03:58:17 |
| emily | should be fine | 04:16:06 |
| emily | yes, Determinate Nix is an opt-out now | 04:16:41 |
| emily | per "To install the recommended vanilla upstream Nix, you will need to explicitly say no when prompted to install Determinate Nix." in our readm | 04:16:44 |
