I gave up on Homebrew (Installing Nix on macOS)

Описание: I’m reinstalling Nix Package Manager on macOS — the right way this time.

If you’ve tried Nix on a Mac before and hated it, same.
This video walks through a practical Nix + nix-darwin setup on macOS that replaces Homebrew, stays incremental, and doesn’t turn your machine into an unreadable declarative mess.

In this walkthrough, I cover:
• Installing Nix on macOS using the Determinate Systems installer
• Setting up nix-darwin without letting it fully control macOS
• Using flakes safely on Apple Silicon
• Declarative global packages (vim, wget, Claude CLI)
• Handling unfree packages correctly
• Enabling Touch ID for sudo
• Updating and rebuilding a Nix-managed Mac system
• Why this approach finally feels usable compared to Homebrew

This is not NixOS-on-Mac.
This is Nix as a package manager for macOS, with nix-darwin used intentionally — not blindly.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Why Nix?
03:00 Install Nix on macOS (Determinant Systems GUI)
08:30 Add nix-darwin via flake.nix
20:00 Extend macOS support: Touch ID, settings, and Rosetta
26:00 Add global packages declaratively (flake.nix)
28:30 Handle unfree packages (Claude CLI)
31:00 Claude CLI setup inside Nix
34:30 Final thoughts: when Nix on Mac makes sense