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Reading the NixOS release notes every 6 months is how I learn about new software that I might want to try: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-rele...

For my first few years of NixOS I didn't understand the point of the NixOS stable releases, since even on "nixos-unstable" I found that if my nix config evaluates, then it'll work. And in the very rare case things broke, I could easily rollback.

NixOS stable, for me, provides API stability. I can leave a machine auto-updating, and be confident that my nix config will continue to be compatible, and thus build.

Thanks to the release managers for the work that goes into this!

Indeed.

As soon as lanzaboote works with stable, I'll go back to stable (but I think that is not the case yet, sadly).

Lowkey plug for lanzaboote though. Getting secure boot working went pretty well for me thanks to it.

There's still the data migration issue. If you follow unstable all the time, an app may update its data files or databases at startup. Then, you can still roll back the binaries, but they'll just refuse to work (best case) or corrupt the unknown data format (worst case).

Yes, it's worth having ~hourly snapshots of your machine, using something like: https://github.com/digint/btrbk

You can still roll-forward specific apps - use the up to date ones if you really need to.

Following up on this, has anyone tried this and seen how well it works in practice?

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I’m about 18mos into managing my macOS hardware with Nix. And I’m conflicted. It’s clearly a powerful system, and I’m still very noob at it. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right solution for macOS. I’ve not felt comfortable enough with it to roll it to Linux hosts yet. Or use its docker image maker.

Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake update` too often as a result. It’s amazing that rolling back is as easy as it is, and that’s huge, but if you squint and reason that mise and nix solve the same issue, why not use the less opinionated, easier to reason about mise?

As time has gone on, more and more of my system is managed via nix-homebrew … effectively producing a Brewfile for the vast majority of my package needs. Why not just use Brewfile directly?

I really want to advocate for nix, but it feels like I lose the “why not x?” conversations with myself, I can’t fathom winning them against a less invested peer.

This past month, I have spent a decent amount of hours (7+) trying to setup nix on my mac with nix-darwin, and failed.

Most tutorial out there encourage you to download someone else's configuration to get going. I don't want to do that. I want to understand at its core how this thing works.

I've read the official nix language documentation, watched YouTube tutorials, read 3rd party tutorials, and still couldn't get going with a simple configuration that would install a few packages.

The nix language is also really unpalatable to me. But I could deal with that if the examples out there showed a consistent way of doing things – that's not the case. It seems one same thing can be done many different ways – but I want to know and do it the right way. I would generally turn myself to the official best practices documentation, except nix' is very short and doesn't help much.

I really want to use nix. There's no question about its advantages. But nix just won't let me (or maybe I'm too old to learn new things).

That being said, I'll probably give it another try this month...

> The nix language is also really unpalatable to me.

yeah, I wish I could give you some "it gets better" good news, but...

I've used NixOS as my daily driver for ~10 years, including the laptop I'm typing this on.

I love NixOS-the-OS, I love nixpkgs-the-ecosystem. but I still hate Nix-the-language.

it's like Perl and Haskell had a drunken hookup that produced a child. and then abandoned that child in the forest where it was raised by wolves and didn't have contact with another human until it was fully grown.

(to answer the inevitable replies, yes I understand functional programming in general, and yes I am aware that Guix exists)

for simple NixOS administration, you can get pretty far with treating configuration.nix as "just" a config file, rather than a program written in a Turing-complete functional language.

writing your own modules or flakes, or re-using flakes published by other people, is strictly optional. make friends with The Big Options Page [0] - anything you find there can be dropped into your configuration.nix without really needing to understand Nix-the-language.

0: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.11

I read the same complaint about the language from people I follow who love and actively promote Nix. So it's not just you.

Sorry for adding to your frustration of "just follow what someone else did" but I recently went all-in on managing my Mac (programs, dotfiles, configs, etc) via Nix* when setting up a new machine recently. https://github.com/landaire/config/tree/main/modules

*Nix + homebrew, mostly because Homebrew packages more macOS applications.

I struggled with this too and it took me a while to accept that there is no right way. There are many ways, and there is a lot of legacy style out there, but ultimately you have to do what works for your own productivity/sanity.

you should look into learning how to write modules. nix-darwin at its core is a somewhat underbaked port of nixos to mac OS with the same very useful module system. otherwise look into just getting home-manager working and working your way up.

(disclaimer: self-plug)

I similarly found `nix flake update` frustrating for a while, especially when using unstable Nixpkgs. I wrote a tool called `npc` that basically solved the problem for me by letting me bisect whatever Nixpkgs channel(s) I have in my flake inputs: https://github.com/samestep/npc

I'm not conflicted. Nothing compares to nix. I've been using it on macOS, for Linux hosts, for years now, and it's been incredibly rock solid. I stopped using homebrew years ago and I couldn't be happier about that.

> Consistently through the 25.05 period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync. I learned not to `nix flake update` too often as a result.

I find using a singular nixpkgs version is almost always a recipe for things breaking if you are on unstable. I usually end up juggling multiple nixpkg versions, for example you might want to pin the input to nix-darwin separately.

This is squarely a nixpkgs problem. It's the largest most active package repository known to man. I am pretty sure GitHub has special-cased infrastructure just for it to even function. Things are much more stable in release branches. If that causes you pain because you want the latest and greatest, it's worth considering that you'd experience the same problem with other package repositories (e.g. Debian), and then asking yourself what it is you are actually trying to accomplish. There's a reason they call it unstable.

> but if you squint and reason that mise and nix solve the same issue, why not use the less opinionated, easier to reason about mise?

If mise works for you then great, use it. When I squint and reason, they do not solve the same issue. I don't know how you come to the same conclusion either. Why are you using nix-darwin at all? What is the overlap between nix-darwin and mise? I don't see it.

If all you want is dev environments, I recommend flox.

At the end of the day I'll continue using nix, and especially nix-darwin, _solely_ because it let me set up a new machine in under 5 minutes and hit the ground running. Nothing else compares.

They do have and apparently the scale of the repo is actively breaking things: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-core-team-update-2025-...

This is all great feedback, thanks!

I got here through devenv, I was fully bought in on its proposal and once I found its edges I started peeking under the covers to understand how it worked.

At that point I was pretty deep in mise for everything that wasn’t using devenv. This perhaps help frame why I see them solving the same problem.

I definitely had my “aha!” and ditched mise because nix seemed it had solved my problems. But now, in a new gig, I’m running into lots of edge cases that mise could solve at the drop of a hat and nix (/ my poor understanding of the fundamentals) struggles with.

So, with that all said, I suppose my point is that you get a lot of overlap between the two, and mise is easier to use and get buy-in on. There are certainly elements I find appealing about nix which mise doesn’t touch (promise of repeatable builds, the entire package ecosystem, etc), however.

I have both Nixos and Macs so I appreciate I can control everything through a single repo. I have a single flake with nixosConfigurations, darwinConfigurations and home manager pointing to different nixpkgs and other weird stuff such as jovian for my gaming pc and a special repo for my rpi5.

> period nix-darwin and nixpkgs would fall out of sync

What do you mean? Those should be fairly independent in practice.

In practice nix-darwin relies on being a drop in, which means maintaining compatibility with api surface which in the proper nixpkgs world is a closed loop. There are several cases of this breaking since 2020 or so.

I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you're already getting some of on OSX. The reason I'm going to use it on OSX again is mostly to get consistent HOME configuration and tooling across all of my devices. I'll manage my OSX home dir and tools with the exact same file across multiple computers.

My principle of adoption was essentially this but in reverse; use it on the system I use the most (macOS), learn, and then use my niche knowledge to apply it to less frequently used computers like my gaming rig.

Along the way I acquired enough talent that use at work seemed reasonable.

As time has gone on, however, I have found things like the stringent need for everything to be built results in archaic packages versions in nixpkgs, etc., while core waits to bump the rustc version. Thus my return to using brew for almost everything albeit managed via nix-homebrew.

Case in point: I use zed, which relies on cutting edge rust features, which nix cannot deploy because of stability concerns. Everyone is right in this situation, but that left me with an archaic version of zed until I moved to the homebrew version.

Could you clarify what you mean regarding Zed? I checked just now and it looks like Nixpkgs had the latest version 0.214.7 within 24 hours of its release: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/466449

That’s great to know! There are plenty of issues which are reasonably well documented in the zed repo.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/26277

About 4mos ago I moved to using brew for zed because at the time there was some hard block on updating rustc in nixpkgs-stable to a version which included some feature that zed relied upon.

Does anyone have a good resource for a quickstart/high-level overview of just the terminology required to understand Nix? Flakes/overlays/nixpkgs/etc. I start wading in to try and understand it, and instead run into arguments and disagreements.

Unfortunately, without a base level understanding of the entire ecosystem, I stay lost.

I started playing with nix few months ago. Youtube videos from Vimjoyer helped a lot. On top of that Claude Code is very good at understanding/explaining/updating config.

Regarding features: so far for my home setup (few vms on proxmox) I only needed flakes. They age good at organizing multihost config.

But besides it it works smoothly. And I constantly have thought “wait, why we didn’t always do it this way?”

Level 1 is using nix to install packages, which you can do by writing a flake like.

The arguments probably come from the fact that flakes are 'experimental', but de facto widely used.

This will be another upgrade for my dev machine running NixOS since 17.something times. Thanks to all maintaines and release managers over the years for such solid work!

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