Comment by CraigJPerry

only thing i'd add is mas for mac app store apps you want to ensure are installed but otherwise i run pretty much the same setup.

When i install a fresh macos i have two commands to run - install nix using the determinate systems installer, then apply my nix config.

It's not quite as streamlined as nixos but good enough.

My biggest remaining pain point is dev envs - i've been leaning into adding a flake in each project, so for example i have a single project that's written in scala 2.13, when i cd into that project dir, the correct jvm version, sbt, intellij etc are installed, some useful env vars and shell aliases etc. - that's all great (i haven't felt the need to adopt denenv.sh or flox yet) but i do find myself wanting a devcontainer sandbox workflow more often these days (blame cli coding "agents"), i lean on vscode for that rather than nix so far. In python (where i spend a lot more time) uv loses a lot of value in nix and i don't like that.