| 13 Mar 2026 |
 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 |
| emily | I didn't see why you want to use Homebrew specifically though so it's possible you don't need it at all | 11:45:55 |
| emily | which is certainly the most native experience if it suffices | 11:46:07 |
 Norinco | Why didn't the Lix installation script create a case-sensitive APFS volume? Won't this cause issues in future use? | 13:02:43 |
| emily | case-sensitive stores on macOS aren't fully ready for prime time yet | 13:06:56 |
| emily | I run with one, but some packages need adjustment for it, and there is complicated stuff around the "case hack" that needs solving first | 13:07:24 |
| emily | along with managing a temporary directory in the store volume | 13:07:52 |
| emily | if/when those issues get fixed there'll probably also be a migration plan for existing stores, so I wouldn't worry about it | 13:08:31 |
 redbunnyninja | ok, i figured it all out. it was some special logic that some of the config scripts had that tried to be too smart. after some tweaking its all fine. thanks for helping :) | 13:15:48 |
