Disclaimer: Nix(OS) developer, I am biased.<p>It's very important for us to get such feedback. This allows us to improve and move forward.<p>In Nix defense I think it's not worth comparing stability yet, although that is the most important aspect for users.<p>What matters currently is how many smart people grasp the idea why we're fundamentally better by architecturing the language and packaging problem itself and any help we get to move us forward.<p>For fair comparison you should note that we have ~800 contributors, probably more than 90% are on Linux. Meanwhile Homebrew packages have almost 6000 contributors.<p>We have recently added 4 macs to our build farm at <a href="http://hydra.nixos.org/machines" rel="nofollow">http://hydra.nixos.org/machines</a>, but we desperately need more developers <i>that care</i>. Not 6000, just a few more.
I've never used Nix for OS X, but I can confirm that the UI can definitely use some work, and the proposed changed which are in the pipe look fantastic.<p>But, comparing Nix on the simple operations is like reviewing a sports car after only driving it in a school zone. There is so much more that Nix provides that homebrew doesn't even come close to.<p>Nix has made managing of my servers way easier then anything I have tried before and I have no intentions of changing away any time soon.
I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily.<p>If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...
Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.
What do people do about packages being old? Many of their front facing server packages are not being updated. Presumably, they have quite a few security issues in them
Nix looks cool on OSX, but trying to install something like elixir from scratch involves my macbook air compiling packages for at least 40+ minutes before I ctrl-break which is a no go.<p>I thought Gentoo was cool in the early 2000s when I didn't do sysadmin work for my job. I'm not waiting an hour or two to install a package anymore.<p>I'm sure this will improve when more precompiled packages are released for OSX when it is more popular.