| 27 Oct 2025 |
 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 |
| emily | * per "To install the recommended vanilla upstream Nix, you will need to explicitly say no when prompted to install Determinate Nix." in our readme | 04:16:44 |
| emily | we should maybe remove the wording about the --determinate flag, but I guess it won't be relevant for long | 04:16:58 |
| samasaur | we could/should change it to --prefer-upstream-nix i think | 04:17:33 |
| samasaur | i guess we should probably check that that flag actually exists | 04:18:43 |
| samasaur | i know they said it would in the initial announcement | 04:18:49 |
| samasaur | but iirc that flag will make it install upstream nix for the two months | 04:19:15 |
| samasaur | and then honestly i think our recommendation should probably be to install lix and use that to bootstrap? | 04:19:50 |
| emily | probably we should just recommend the experimental installer… if it actually ships… | 04:20:22 |
| samasaur | because i'm figuring that most people just use the default of "letting nix-darwin manage your nix install with the default options" (as i do) and if they aren't doing that they should know what they're doing anyway | 04:20:43 |
| emily | afaik the main blocker has just been some infra stuff for months | 04:20:45 |
| emily | but it sounded like that was getting resolved | 04:20:49 |
