It's not mainly about speed (although the ceiling is much higher), but about ergonomics, and, plainly, enjoyability. The other benefit of making your own environment is mastery and control; only you can decide when and how the environment changes.
> The discovery that chronic inflammation can provide the impetus for cancers to develop is forcing clinicians to rethink their approach to the disease’s prevention.
Alternative health has been saying this for decades. Ketogenic diets + medicinal plants/mushrooms can do a lot, even after the fact.
I don't use Determinate Nix but I've heard it recommended. As I've said I've had 1 or 2 issues with my Nix install on Mac over several years.
Re: ffmpeg, it's just something do to with default codecs or something I don't remember, I'm not even sure I really needed it but I saw it on my packages list and since I use nix-darwin it doesn't matter that much where the package comes from. I have hundreds of packages from nixpkgs, many shared with Linux, and quite a few Mac specific ones.
Again, I'm not part of a Nix cult, I just genuinely have had an overall great experience with Nix and I find the criticism overblown. I guess since a subset of users are very enthusiastic and vocal about it it attracts this.
This is just from my experience, I'm not part of any kind of Nix cult or anything, not that I'm aware of.
I don't know what you're talking about re: third party wrappers, this is just an option for a slightly easier and perhaps more robust install. And homebrew isn't free of issues at all.
I'm curious of what the packages are because I only have ~10 packages that I use from homebrew, either very Mac-specific or that have better packaging (ffmpeg, mpv)
I'm interested in how you use that homebrew-to-nix converter, if you have links to configs or can describe it briefly!
I agree that nix-darwin is a bit overkill, I mainly use it for the homebrew integration, but I think so is home-manager, I don't keep user app configs in Nix since they are never exhaustive and more effort than it's worth.
Yeah, I'm just addressing you specifically, you could switch easily and Nix has a much larger package selection (outside of GUI apps on macOS). And it immediately can do more via nix-shell -p, which can be also be used as shebang.
But yeah, Nix is much more than a homebrew replacement and that has its downsides.
I think Nix has a marketing issue as it goes so deep. But if you're going to consider it only as an alternative to homebrew, you don't have to know anything aside from different CLI invocations: `nix-shell -iA <package>` to install, and maybe a step up with `nix-shell -p <package> --run <cmd>` to run without installing. You don't have to use nix-darwin or managing configs and the Nix language at all.
I sort of get what you're saying and I've had a few sporadic issues myself, once or twice I had to reinstall (although might have been my mishandling), but overall I can't see a better solution than this. Plus I can share the configs with Linux.
Nix (and nix-darwin for persistent config) already does the job for non-GUI apps better than anything else could (its catalog is unmatched), and homebrew (also available in nix-darwin) handles GUI apps.
You don't strictly need it, it just makes it a tiny bit more convenient since you can set it up to override DNS on any connected device, and Tailscale sets up a private VPN mesh between your devices I've come to get take for granted - a tangential feature that goes well with centrally managed DNS.