How I'm currently using nix

I've gotten a few questions surrounding how I'm using nix at this point in my workflow. Even without knowing much of it yet, I've managed to work a bit of it into my daily workflow. I'm typing this on my laptop which I rarely need to rely on as a test bed for NixOS. This lets me play with things that I may or may not like on a daily use system, server, ect, all without interrupting my daily workflow. Thus far, it's forced a few changes to my dotfiles, which isn't super uncommon for supporting a new Linux distro. Most notably, I had to remove launching Sway on tty1 login, though it's likely a lack of understanding on how that works.

My primary use thus far for nix has been using it with home-manager to replace my userspace on my Mac Mini and now this laptop. The ultimate intent is to be able to keep all of my userspace portable to my servers as well, or if I end up back on Fedora, I can still have a uniform userspace without touching the core immutable OS underneath it. With home-manager acting as a stand in for world files in the OS/pmm, it keeps it all centralized. I have not decided if I want to use tooling such as nix-darwin due to it's increased chance of breaking on MacOS updates. If my userspace is broken, that's one thing, but I'm not sure how much power it has over the host system and if it would be able to soft brick on updates. Further research and testing will need done.

Because of the lack of nix-darwin, unless I'm missing something, I don't believe that I can get full integration with GUI applications on Mac, which causes some minor inconeniences. The first place that I had noticed this is having emacs installed through homebrew which I tend to do things like compiling and other tasks through. Because it's not tightly integrated into tooling like nix-direnv, it can't see the tooling made avaliable. It's not a deal breaker to me as I'm used to working in an external terminal already, though I do intend to solve it if possible and the gains outweigh any costs associated. Only time will tell.