I've been using nix on macOS as my primary package manager for years. Really love it! Specifically nix-shell is a blessing a you can quickly try out things without worrying about breaking some other packages on the system.

Initially we've only used nix for development at my company, but now we're also running most of our servers with NixOS. This allows us to use our dev package definitions in production, so our dependencies are always in sync between dev and prod. I've written a blog post about all the advantages we get with nix in our framework IHP a while ago, if you're curious, check it out: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/blog/2020-07-22-why-ihp-is-...

If you're using an older mac and have troubles with installing nix, try out the new installer in this GH issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4289 (the command is in the "Try it out" section). It's already merged, but not released yet. So far this has solved all the issues on older macs for me.

Also check out https://nix.dev/ which has many great resources to get started :)