I do this too. Nix is incredible, until it isn’t and then I regret using it so much.

I’ll probably use something dumber for the next machine, and keep nix for servers and local vms.

I'm trying nix instead of Homebrew on my mac. It worked great until I decided to give rust a shot. I think my solution is to just do rust development on my Arch machine and stick with nix. That said, if I run into additional issues, I will probably just go back to Homebrew.

Where were your pain points?

from the top of my head: various hacks to make apps available to spotlight, packages/apps behind their equivalents in brew to the point where I use nix to orchestrate brew for too many things, starting envs and build switch is too slow for my taste despite caching etc, nix the language is unfriendly and hard to debug, the stack traces are useless, etc

Highly recommend keeping Nix to your NixOS machines. IYKYK

Can you elaborate? I don't know, and would like to know.

I have custom scripts to bootstrap my macOS as many others here, and I can testify that migrating to nix-darwin greatly simplified my scripts.

P.S. I don’t use home manager though as I also need to bootstrap systems without nix.