| 13 Mar 2026 |
 emily | Homebrew doesn't really support multiple installs unfortunately | 11:30:30 |
 nasso | yeah i had a feeling i wasn't supposed to set it at all in this case | 11:31:05 |
| emily | you can assign a dedicated Homebrew admin user or have an unsupported per-user installation (but nix-darwin wouldn't manage those and HM doesn't have anything for it AFAIK) | 11:31:11 |
| emily | combining nix-darwin and HM sounds like what you want l | 11:31:27 |
| emily | * | 11:31:34 |
| emily | probably with the HM integration module for nix-darwin | 11:31:46 |
| emily | shared stuff in nix-darwin, per-user in HM | 11:32:02 |
| nasso | how would homebrew fit in this | 11:32:09 |
| emily | also you may not need Homebrew. I used it to install GUI app casks but Nixpkgs has a lot more of those packaged than it used to. I'd definitely prefer Nixpkgs packages over formulae | 11:32:55 |
| nasso | also just to be sure, by "dedicated homebrew admin user" you mean e.g. a user named "brew" that is just here to own the global homebrew installation ? | 11:33:13 |
| nasso | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
also you may not need Homebrew. I used it to install GUI app casks but Nixpkgs has a lot more of those packaged than it used to. I'd definitely prefer Nixpkgs packages over formulae yes me too id prefer not to use homebrew | 11:33:41 |
| emily | Homebrew can automate installation of complex binary packages that ship with installer .apps or .pkgs, and it happens to have a wider range of standard .apps packaged than Nixpkgs (but there's a couple repos that automatically convert every "standard" cask to a Nix package you can use too) | 11:34:37 |
| emily | other than that it's redundant | 11:34:47 |
| emily | oh and it can also automate App Store via mas of course, although mas is often flaky... | 11:35:15 |
| nasso | hehe flaky | 11:35:25 |
| emily | and IIRC we might have a native module for that now | 11:35:26 |
| emily | yeah | 11:35:34 |
| emily | they don't really support that though | 11:35:47 |
| emily | they don't support a lot of things :P | 11:35:56 |
| nasso | yeah haha | 11:36:16 |
| nasso | well thank you so much! love your work | 11:36:30 |
| emily | don't thank me too much, I've been neglecting nix-darwin terribly lately 😅 | 11:37:13 |
| emily | samasaur and Enzime deserve the credit for keeping it going right now | 11:37:53 |
| nasso | ive seen you a lot when digging through multi-user issues and PRs :p | 11:39:03 |
| emily | yeah killing off user-specific activation was my white whale for like a year and a half haha | 11:40:25 |
| emily | fwiw, I consider everything that needs system.primaryUser set to be essentially deprecated and something that should be handled in Home Manager instead or at least under users.users.<name> | 11:41:01 |
| emily | the problem is there's not always a good alternative yet and I haven't had time to draw the rest of the owl | 11:41:34 |
| emily | but the idea is that a configuration shouldn't treat any particular user specially | 11:42:15 |
| nasso | that's what i was understanding yeah that's why i didn't want to set primaryUser | 11:42:38 |
| emily | note that you'll have to set up Homebrew manually as that user unless you use a third party module like nix-homebrew to bootstrap it | 11:45:27 |
