- Homebrew can be a pain. I've had several occasions where it broke something on my system with its magic. The main reason for this is its imperative (as opposed to declarative) nature. You can easily install things that clash with other software installed on your system.
- You can easily install different versions of the same software without having to worry about clashes
- Fully declarative configuration. You know exactly what is installed on your system at any time.
- Portable reproducible configuration. Imagine you get a new laptop. Because you have have your system configuration declared with nix and home-manager you can copy the configuration file, run install, and your system is set up, exactly the way the old one was.
- To add to the above, you can also do the same with non-MacOS systems if you make your config conditional on MacOS. I sometimes want to work on a remote Linux machine. I can set up a full dev environment with all the tools I use locally with a single command now.
If you want a more declarative approach to Homebrew: ‘brew bundle’ uses ‘Brewfile’s for this. You can share these on macOS and Linux and add similar conditionals.
Not nearly as reproducible but: this is something I’m working on. Stay tuned…
The existing Brewfile functionality what Nix-Darwin's Homebrew module currently uses behind the scenes, so any improvements here might also benefit some Nix users on macOS (including me!).
The conditionals and cross-platform stuff might also make it possible to write a single module here that enables use of Homebrew as an escape hatch both on macOS and Linux/NixOS, which would maybe be kinda cool.
- Learn Nix
- Homebrew can be a pain. I've had several occasions where it broke something on my system with its magic. The main reason for this is its imperative (as opposed to declarative) nature. You can easily install things that clash with other software installed on your system.
- You can easily install different versions of the same software without having to worry about clashes
- Fully declarative configuration. You know exactly what is installed on your system at any time.
- Portable reproducible configuration. Imagine you get a new laptop. Because you have have your system configuration declared with nix and home-manager you can copy the configuration file, run install, and your system is set up, exactly the way the old one was.
- To add to the above, you can also do the same with non-MacOS systems if you make your config conditional on MacOS. I sometimes want to work on a remote Linux machine. I can set up a full dev environment with all the tools I use locally with a single command now.