I'm really happy with it overall. All the hardware works perfectly, and I don't notice the bit of RAM & CPU reserved for the host. The only downside is that some packages aren't available for aarch64-linux, e.g. Slack, Spotify, etc. I just run those on the host OS instead, which is a little annoying due to context switching but not a huge deal.
Hmm, my edit below erased my original comment, as I wasn't paying attention... Anyway, the gist is that NixOS runs great in Parallels, using the patched parallels-tools module from this nixos config: https://github.com/wegank/nixos-config/tree/main/hardware/pa...
Some packages on nixpkgs aren't available for aarch64-linux, but mostly unfree stuff like Spotify that's available on macOS. Overall I really like it, and I hardly ever interact with the host OS anymore for dev work. That said, I still use macOS for casual browsing, since scrolling and trackpad gestures are smoother than in linux. Not a big deal, since copy/paste works fine.
Mine is using an older and more complicated version of the parallels-tools patch, so go with the one linked above if you end up using Parallels.
You could also try UTM, which now has support for Rosetta for x86 binaries. There's a good writeup for NixOS + Rosetta here that I can confirm works: https://xyno.space/post/nixos-utm-rosetta - I had some random instability with UTM though, so switched back to Parallels.
This is a nice idea actually for finessing the GPU driver issue - use the virtual GPU drivers. (As a bonus you still have access to macOS desktop apps if you need or want them.)
Personally I use tend to use Linux VMs as if they were remote servers, so I don't have a huge need for Linux GPU drivers.
One thing that helped with VMware Fusion is using host-local interfaces with static IP addresses. Otherwise I would tend to get disconnected from VMs when macOS disconnected from wi-fi, which was very annoying. This is less of an issue if you're using the VM window directly.
You could install NixOS on your Mac. I've installed Debian, some use Fedora; you just use the Asahi installer to repartition and install the kernel, and after that you can isntall your distro of choice (not super easy though).
I used to do this and there are a few annoyances, and the set of annoyances is different for every VM software you choose. My preference was VMWare Fusion. The worst annoyance there was that it emulated touchpad scrolling as a mouse wheel, so you didn’t get pixel-precise scrolling but instead jumped several lines after you had moved your fingers some significant amount.
Overall it all worked fine, and far more reliably than Linux on a modern laptop running natively (if you can get past the minor annoyances).
I only use Lima on the Mac I use at work. But by any limitation by my employer, it's just the easiest thing I've found for running a few containers for my semi-daily workflow.
Nope. I tried it and hated the MacOS GUI. I like my window-manager config, and various other deep customizations. Also, MacOS updates kept breaking things.
macOS updates breaking things is one of the biggest frustrations I remember from regularly using macOS with Nix (and Homebrew, and a handful of third-party GUI apps, for that matter). The macOS GUI environment isn't for me, either.
Nix-Darwin (the module system that gives you some NixOS-like features with Nix on macOS) is nice, but macOS ultimately can't match the predictability and control one gets used to on NixOS. A system that updates in a non-uniform way, has limited configurability, and where the configuration of the system isn't given anywhere in a trackable, comprehensible form feels painfully chaotic in comparison.
(I can understand why Nix on Darwin (with or without Nix-Darwin) is a great fit for many, though. Having a 'normal', mainstream desktop underneath your still relatively predictable, explicit, reproducible dev tooling is awesome in a lot of ways.)
I want the MacBooks for the battery backup, but I cannot live without NixOS, and seems like Asahi is still a few months away.