nixos-apple-silicon VS lima

I just used this: https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/blob/main/do...

I used one of their releases rather than building my own image. It’s a guide that merits careful reading, as some key steps are not specifically bulleted. Oh, and it’s not the NixOS graphical installer.

But it was dead simple, and 99% of the heavy lifting is from the Asahi team. The biggest downside is that updating the support files is a manual process, but NixOS of course makes it a breeze to rebuild into a new environment—and back out if it doesn’t work.

I doubt it will ever have native support. NixOS doesn't do native support. For what it's worth I'm running NixOS on an M2 Max MPB using https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon.

Most hardcore Nix users/developers I have met have been suspicious for Flakes for several years, so your point rings true.

That said, it feels like they are slowly coming to terms with it and just accepting it as default. Here are two examples of maintainers eventually accepting flake support on their repos after initial hesitation [1][2].

[1] https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/pull/47

I do, no issues at all with the beta Asahi kernel, you basically have to git clone https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon in /etc/nixos/, include a file from that repo in the configuration.nix and configure as you like (beta gpu driver or not, which kernel, 4k pages or not, ecc). The experience then is exactly the same as a stock NixOS installation.

there is a NixOS iso for m1 you can use it https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon

You can run a virtual machine (e.g. lima) from inside a nix-shell, exactly as you would do with a regular shell.

for others similarly curious, here's an example of the thing: https://github.com/noop-inc/template-java-spring-boot/blob/m...

they seem to be using the excellent lima <https://github.com/lima-vm/lima#readme> for booting on macOS; I run colima for its containerd and k8s support but strongly recommend both projects $(brew install lima colima)

Lima is what I use as well. It's quick and easy to just fire up a VM with default settings, but also very easy to configure with different file sharing options, port forwarding, different linux distributions, etc. (their examples are also pretty good IMO [1]).

In particular I use it to run an amd64 VM, which I need to run a stubborn service for work that doesn't run on arm CPUs.

[1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/tree/master/examples

Lima (1) is a project that packages Linux distros for MacOS and executes them via qemu in the backend. Maybe you could solve your problem by launching one of their vms and inspecting the command line it generates. You might find an option you were missing.

(1) https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

If you wish to delve into all the configuration possibilities for Lima VM, you can visit this resource.

I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Github: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

Lima wraps QEMU in a simple CLI, with neat features for container users, such as filesystem sharing and automatic localhost port forwarding, as well as DNS and proxy propagation for enterprise networks. Rancher Desktop wraps Lima with k3s integration and GUI.

Talks: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/master/docs/talks.md