Since you cannot use Virtualbox on Apple silicon (this might be the future-proof reference instead of M1, as we are already at M2), I settled with UTM to run my VM. In the following sections, I will go trough my setup, and share a few tips I learned during installing NixOS to 4 different machines. Additionally, I will finally get a better docker experience compared to the one I have on macOS. This will keep the host OS clean, you can run multiple versions of the same packages, and you can keep all of your config in a safe git repository. While you can use Nix on bare software macOS, I thought it’s better to do it the native way, and provision declarative VMs, that can even share certain parts of the configs. The reason behind nixing with VMs on macOS’ was to get rid of the chaos of Homebrew.

Since a few weeks before that my Manjaro Linux broke, I decided to use NixOS there as well.Ī few days later I installed it on Virtualbox on my Intel MBP, and finally it made its way to on my M1 machine too. I played with it for about and hour, and I liked it.

If this applies to you, be cautious with Nix(OS)!Ī few weeks ago I decided to give it a try, and installed it on a RPI4. There might be some ramp-up period that varies person to person, but once you get its benefits (or better, once you are affected by the lack of them) you will try to do everything in a reproducible way. I think you can get addicted to automation (it’s a nice blog post idea!), and implementing everything in a declarative way. I am not even sure where I heard first about Nix and NixOS, but I liked the concept right away.

Qemu m1 linux