Hmpffff

(doom, sludge, …) metal, macos, nix(os), nix-darwin, binnen:, he/his, neurodingens, werder

Last Notes

2026-06-21 15:21:17 UTC

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Oh, I completely overlooked that part about the admin password: On Linux, you still have to authenticate yourself even if Firefox is installed via the system updater.

2026-06-21 12:39:17 UTC

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For example, I explicitly like the way things were done in macOS (or, in the past, RISC OS). That’s exactly why I chose those systems. That’s what made them better for ME. (3/3)

2026-06-21 12:39:17 UTC

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And one more thing: it’s NEVER a good idea to expect that another system will work exactly the same way as the one you’re familiar with. That doesn’t work either way. Anyone who takes that approach is bound to hit a wall and end up disappointed. Many things can be solved in different ways without any of them being wrong. You may like or dislike one approach or another, but that tends to be a personal preference. (2/3)

2026-06-21 12:39:17 UTC

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For macOS, there's Homebrew. You can also use it to manage GUI software. For example, Cork provides a GUI for managing that software. And with nix-darwin and nix-homebrew, you can also manage GUI software via Nix if you want to. (1/3)

2026-06-21 12:29:57 UTC

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I think you're oversimplifying things here. In macOS, things just work differently when it comes to GUI software. Not wrong, just different. And historically speaking, that was the right choice. In any case, with macOS (and RISC OS before that), I’ve never had an update to anything break my system. In all Linux distros (except for NixcOS), that was exactly my main problem: updates often break things. (1/3)

2024-08-29 12:56:18 UTC

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This is not a bug. This is a security feature (similar to what some Linux distributions do today). However, this resulted in the problem that the Nix installer could not create a /nix folder. I don't know when /etc/synthetic.conf was introduced, but that was the way to create the Nix Store on a volume and show it as /nix via synthetics.conf. (1/2)

2024-08-28 18:41:17 UTC

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Ah, good point. To my rescue, however, I can point out that this falls right into my first attempts with Nix. Now that you mention it, I remember that there was a problem. That was the introduction of the R/O system, wasn't it? But this specific problem is due to a fundamental, legitimate change to the way macOS works. I would therefore want to consider it separately. This would also have led to problems on other platforms.

2024-08-28 16:45:09 UTC

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Apart from minor incompatibilities, I have never had any problems with macOS updates since 2002. And even with Nix (nix-darwin and home-manager) I only had the problem with /etc/zshrc and the missing Nix hook. And for this I had built a launchd job that checks at every system start whether the hook is still there and adds it again if necessary. Since then: no problems.
Oh yes: I've always taken all macOS betas with me. (1/3)