I gave up on Homebrew (Installing Nix on macOS)

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