 | Nix on macOS | 1208 Members |
| “There are still many issues with the Darwin platform but most of it is quite usable.” — http://yves.gnu-darwin.org | 203 Servers |
| Nix on macOS | 1208 Members |
| “There are still many issues with the Darwin platform but most of it is quite usable.” — http://yves.gnu-darwin.org | 203 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Apr 2026 | ||
 alexfmpe | happened to me with setting the locale or language or something | 23:03:13 |
| 29 Apr 2026 | ||
 zeroq7k joined the room. | 12:47:27 | |
| zeroq7k | Hey there, I'm very new to nix & nix-darwin; I was just reading into it over the weekend for several hours and have one question before going to try it out: Let's say I just set one single element in systems.default (e.g. dock.autohide) and then let it run on a system which is already in use and has changed several system settings already. Now, will nix/nix-darwin reset all those changed settings to their defaults used in nix-darwin or will it just set the single setting I added to my flake.nix (the dock.autohide) and leave everything else as it is right now? | 12:59:31 |
 Alex Nicolaou | Try asking these sorts of questions of Gemini — the LLMs are pretty solid in nix usage and will give you good answers a large percentage of the time. tl;dr: it will not reset other settings. | 13:03:24 |
 K900 | That is absolutely not a recommendation I would make tbh | 13:03:43 |
| K900 | Especially when there's risk of data loss | 13:03:49 |
| Alex Nicolaou | have you had a bad experience? | 13:04:09 |
| K900 | I've seen plenty | 13:04:30 |
| zeroq7k | Thanks, I do – with mixed results. But I'm not trusting the replies; you get different things when asking in different ways... "Is it correct that xyz?" will always give you a "yes" answer :-) | 13:05:06 |
| Alex Nicolaou | I am set up with a fairly minimal base system for nix-darwin and nixos, then a home manager setup for tools that are truly common across my projects, then flakes for each project with the specific tools for that project, and find that using LLMs to write the nix configurations and manage the various layers is dramatically faster and easier than writing them myself. Since it's all backed by git as well as nix's own ability to roll back configurations, I have never experienced the 'data loss' that k900 is referring to. I consider it one of the great strengths of the nix ecosystem in the age of AI — it is finally usable for anyone who cares to understand the high level, without needing to spend ages mucking around with the configurations yourself, while still being legible/understandable when you want to see what the configuration is (assuming you take the time to learn to read and write nix code) | 13:08:19 |
| zeroq7k | fwiw, a chsh -S /path/to/shell will never be successful as long as /path/to/shell isn't in /etc/shells. But I guess you already knew that... | 13:08:43 |
| zeroq7k | Thanks for sharing your experience; I am still at the stage where I try to understand the high level architecture before really diving into using it. yes, I know, I'm slow but I'm one of those guys who invest time into understanding instead of just playing around and copy & pasting commands :-) | 13:13:18 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Oh, to be clear, it's not that I think you shouldn't understand nix. but since all the resources are out of date and all the advice out there is wrong, usign the LLMs to help you figure it out and understand it will be an accelerant. It's still worth slogging through the ancient nix pills series and reading all you can about flakes, but there is no good on ramp available to make it so that your first configurations come out right to begin with. | 13:15:01 |
| Alex Nicolaou | you have to bear in mind that the reason LLMs get it wrong is because the wrongness is out there. | 13:15:26 |
 Ihar Hrachyshka | I will not take a position on whether you SHOULD use llm, but if you want to use it to understand how code works, make sure it has access to the code checkout - use coding agent, not a browser UI that doesn't have cheap way to ground itself in reality. | 13:17:58 |
| Alex Nicolaou | this does unfortunately remind me that I'm overdue to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything ... an annoyance but the only way that I can be 100% sure I haven't infected my perfect nix world with manual config. | 13:27:19 |
| zeroq7k | Yeah, I get what you're saying and I concur. I'm testing qwen3.6 locally at the moment and it's useful to explain things or even help creating nix files but for answers to questions like the above I simply don't trust it :-) Oh, and Ihar Hrachyshka: +1, chatbots without context, access to files or other tooling are more or less useless when working with code. | 13:28:13 |
 Randy Eckenrode | The default is null, which means unmanaged, so it should only change the setting that you set. | 13:29:34 |
| Randy Eckenrode | However, it will work if you use sudo chsh. That’s how I set it. | 13:31:29 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Unfortunatley the OSS models are still light years behidn the foundation models and I am unable to use them for anything real. | 13:33:03 |
| zeroq7k | Didn't work for me a couple days ago. I had to explicitly add the path to the shell to /etc/shells before it applied it. | 13:33:25 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Must be something I'm misunderstanding about the shell discussion, why would you want to run a one-off command for it instead of configuring it? | 13:34:35 |
| zeroq7k |  Download Screenshot 2026-04-29 at 15.34.48.png | 13:35:53 |
| zeroq7k | They are not that bad anymore, here's the answer to my question above... | 13:35:54 |
| Alex Nicolaou | I'll be trying out the new deepseek soon and see if it can be used but overall i regret buying my machine because it was very expensive and I can't readily make use of the local LLMs for anything but toy demos. | 13:41:06 |
| Randy Eckenrode | nix-darwin doesn’t support managing your shell. The setting doesn’t use chsh. In general, nix-darwin is very conservative when it comes to managing existing accounts. | 14:16:42 |
 Spore | In reply to @anicolao:matrix.orgI use my macbook at $work for some image editing | 14:18:05 |
 WeetHet | Unfortunately, I wish there was support for more account management, but the downside of that is that someone would wipe their account following LLM instructions I guess | 14:20:39 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Or even doing something that seems harmless like rolling back to before when you added yourself to knownUsers. Supposedly there are safeguards now, but the documentation hasn't been updated. | 14:22:37 |
| Randy Eckenrode | See https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin/issues/1237 | 14:22:41 |