 | Nix on macOS | 1172 Members |
| “There are still many issues with the Darwin platform but most of it is quite usable.” — http://yves.gnu-darwin.org | 192 Servers |
| Nix on macOS | 1172 Members |
| “There are still many issues with the Darwin platform but most of it is quite usable.” — http://yves.gnu-darwin.org | 192 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Mar 2026 | ||
 ragdoc | I watched a teardown video today. I did not expect the very small board. | 15:15:40 |
| ragdoc | I saw a graphic of how CPU and RAM are sandwiched, Randy Eckenrode. Makes sense in the confines of a phone, for sure. | 15:17:50 |
 emily | it's a perf thing, not a size thing (the high-end chips have RAM on the SoC too) | 15:20:16 |
| ragdoc | It's certainly nice to see that nix-darwin seems well within the Neo's comfort zone. | 15:21:29 |
 redbunnyninja | regarding 8 gb of ram: i've been on a mission to de-electronify my life and this has significantly reduced memory usage. on my m1 pro i saved about 10 gb of ram just by not using electron apps where possible. this also might push app devs to write leaner apps that don't require a packaged browser runtime to display some buttons and text | 15:35:21 |
| ragdoc | redbunnyninjaI have been developing software since the 1980s, and I find the waste of RAM and CPU cycles in 2026 nauseating. And that's with the knowledge that CS pioneers did amazing work with far less resources than I had available (and wasted) when I started in this business. | 15:46:48 |
 toonn | emily: The M series chips have the RAM on the package but next to the CPU parts, no? While A18 or whatever it was has it laid on top. I can imagine it'd require significantly more engineering to change that and they simply don't have much incentive to do so. | 16:26:53 |
 nasso | i just received my new macbook and im trying to setup nix-darwin with determinate nix but im not sure how im supposed to generate the configuration... determinate's docs say nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin" but nix-darwin docs say i should create /etc/nix-darwin, chown it, and then run nix flake init -t nix-darwin/nix-darwin-25.11...im not sure how to understand any of this because i am still very unfamiliar with nix in general 😰 | 16:31:05 |
| nasso | i just received my new macbook and im trying to setup nix-darwin with determinate nix but im not sure how im supposed to generate the configuration... determinate's docs say nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin"but nix-darwin docs say i should create /etc/nix-darwin, chown it, and then run nix flake init -t nix-darwin/nix-darwin-25.11...im not sure how to understand any of this because i am still very unfamiliar with nix in general 😰 | 16:31:25 |
| nasso | i just received my new macbook and im trying to setup nix-darwin with determinate nix but im not sure how im supposed to generate the configuration... determinate's docs say nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin"but nix-darwin docs say i should create /etc/nix-darwin, chown it, and then run nix flake init -t nix-darwin/nix-darwin-25.11...im not sure how to understand any of this because i am still very unfamiliar with nix in general 😰 am i supposed to run nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin" in ~? it creates .envrc and flake.nix files and i dont know where im supposed to put them | 16:32:48 |
| nasso | i just received my new macbook and im trying to setup nix-darwin with determinate nix but im not sure how im supposed to generate the configuration... determinate's docs say nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin"but nix-darwin docs say i should create /etc/nix-darwin, chown it, and then run nix flake init -t nix-darwin/nix-darwin-25.11...im not sure how to understand any of this because i am still very unfamiliar with nix in general 😰 am i supposed to run nix flake init --template "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/flake-templates/0#nix-darwin" in ~? it creates .envrc and flake.nix files and i dont know where im supposed to have them | 16:32:57 |
| nasso | oh i had no realized with determinate's template you're supposed to run nix develop --command apply-nix-darwin-configuration instead of nix flake init -t nix-darwin/nix-darwin-25.11 whoopslooks like it worked! | 17:33:44 |
 WeetHet | I'm still running M1 with 8gb of RAM and it works reasonably well for most tasks | 17:38:17 |
| nasso | i did it!!! however im not sure how to configure my system preferences... of course, because i have multiple users, and system preferences are per-user, they need to somehow be defined for each user on the system and shouldn't rely on primaryUseri looked into "home manager" but i dont really understand how it can achieve that? also it seems to be not very beginner friendly (im scared) | 21:41:23 |
| nasso | is there a way i can define a default system configuration "template" that i then tweak for each user i want to apply it to? | 21:42:19 |
| nasso | (in my case, i dont think i have any user-specific setting so all users would just be using the same configuration) | 21:43:00 |
| nasso | how can i install homebrew packages with nix-darwin in a multi-user scenario? | 22:50:31 |
 axw | you can specify a target dir for each package | 23:14:35 |
| nasso | i read somewhere some people isolate homebrew with a separate user account, what does it look like in practice? is it like creating a user named brew or something and then setting up homebrew.user = "brew"? | 23:17:48 |
| nasso | oh neat! what would the target dir look like to install a cask named foo for user alice only? | 23:19:40 |
| axw | see example conf here https://mynixos.com/nix-darwin/option/homebrew.casks | 23:28:01 |
| axw | | 23:32:29 |
| axw | * | 23:35:32 |
| axw | in homebrew.casks = [] instead of just foo | 23:36:54 |
| axw | * in homebrew.casks = [] instead of just foo | 23:37:33 |
| 13 Mar 2026 | ||
| nasso | oooh thank you so much | 01:33:48 |
| nasso | ok so the idea is to literally put them in ~alice | 01:34:36 |
| nasso | didn't know that was possible! awesome | 01:34:51 |
| nasso | but then if i have a system with, say, users alice and bob, and i want to install cask foo for alice only, cask bar for bob only and cask baz for bothwho should be the homebrew.user? thats the main thing im confused about rn because in my case neither alice nor bob stand out as the "main" user really, they're both sharing the same system but i wanna be able to do edit and update my nix-darwin config from both ideally (they're both admin) | 01:37:46 |
| nasso | but then if i have a system with, say, users alice and bob, and i want to install cask foo for alice only, cask bar for bob only and cask baz for bothwho should be the homebrew.user? thats the main thing im confused about rn because in my case neither alice nor bob stand out as the "main" user really, they're both sharing the same system but i wanna be able to do edit and update my nix-darwin config from both ideally (they're both admin btw) | 01:37:49 |