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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

i’m just so over microsoft. mac is expensive, but otherwise great. nixos is awesome. have to use a windows vm for work, but thankfully IT deals with it. when microsoft launched wsl, I thought it would be amazing, but all their forced bing integration has driven me nuts and i’m out on them.

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Apple had an equally egregious bug a year back that soft-bricked anyone upgrading with promotion disabled

Every Mac I've used for the past 5 years haven't been expensive. I switched away from Windows 5 years ago, and not looking back. Heck, some of the video cards for Windows costs more than my entire system here.

If the base model will work for you, then it can be super cheap, but when you need upgrades, it gets expensive super fast.

I’m optimistic that the M4 chip based Macs will have better IO across the line and better RAM specs for AI, and overall not get us sucked into upgrades for no purpose. If you use multiple displays, you basically have to get pro or ultra chips, but rumor is M4 will offer way better options in this regard with more display engines and thunderbolt ports.

> mac is expensive, but otherwise great.

Someone who doesn't care that /usr/bin is on a READ ONLY partition... (and no you can't change it.)

I'm on nixos but honestly tempted to move to mac and nix. I love Nix as an idea and it's flawless for me most of the time, but that little friction i get trying something new is a bit of a pain.

Nix is so awesome. I use Claude ai refactor parts of my os into modules so I can just turn them on and off and it does an awesome job!

My concern with using Nix on Mac is that the uninstall is not as good so you can’t just comment out something and the Mac will just eliminate it from your system and it will be gone, but I’m considering switching to Nix darwin as well. Let me know how it goes for you!

Oh i've been using Nix on mac for quite a while. Not sure about the uninstall, but recently i did a fresh macbook install and used the Determinate Systems Nix Installer[1]. I haven't tried uninstalling, but installation was a joy by comparison to the traditional way (and poor documentation).

[1]: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer/

I will try it.

When I said uninstalling, I mean the way you can just comment out a program in the configuration file on a nix system and poof it is no longer installed in your system and it’s like it was never installed at all.

Ah, that happens with Nix Darwin too. It's otherwise a full Nix install.

Note though that i'm not sure how well it integrates with Mac as a Desktop. I've not tried it to install desktop apps. I only use it for term oriented apps/libs/etc, and for that it works as you'd expect.

Not sure what the best possible Nix UX is for Mac desktop apps.

I think if raycast came out for linux, I would be able to switch to linux

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