| 13 Mar 2026 |
 nasso | (i actually have the same question with system settings and system.primaryUser, it's unclear which one should be the "primaryUser" in this case... there isn't one!) | 01:38:52 |
 Sarah Clark | Home-manager isn't terribly hard and will be better for keeping a declaratrive system definition than using homebrew. You can search github for home-manager configurations | 03:15:49 |
 Randy Eckenrode | e.g., here’s mine: https://github.com/reckenrode/nixos-configs | 03:57:39 |
|  Nikhil Snow changed their display name from nikhil to Nikhil Snow. | 05:56:58 |
| nasso | oh cool thanks! i will look into it! | 09:32:39 |
 toonn | nasso: Re sharing packages between multiple users, you can probably just do a local binding somewhere `let sharedPackages = [ pkgs.package-a pkgs.package-b ]; in users.alice.packages = sharedPackages ++ [ pkgs.package-c ]; ...`. | 10:13:30 |
| nasso | yeah for regular nix packages that seems easy | 10:14:08 |
| nasso | i also realized shortly after asking my question that the same problem exists for mac app store apps lol
i dont even think macOS has a native way to install mac app store apps only for one user... that seems... sucky | 10:14:58 |
 emily | on a multi user system, don't set it | 11:30:18 |
| 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 |
