Changelog: improved nix-darwin support for Determinate!

We’re excited to announce a handful of quality-of-life improvements to Determinate:

• Determinate now ships with Nix 2.26.2.
• FlakeHub Cache is no longer added to your nix.conf substituters until you’re logged in, eliminating the confusing not a binary cache error.
• Much improved nix-darwin support! People who use both Determinate and nix-darwin should now set nix.enable = false in their nix-darwin configuration. This enables Determinate to handle Nix installation and configuration rather than nix-darwin, as was the case before. Many gracious thanks to Emily on the nix-darwin team for helping us with this. We’ll have much more to say about this soon.

This release also has two bug fixes specifically targeted to enterprise users:

• Enterprise macOS users with Time Machine disabled by Mobile Device Management (MDM) can now install Determinate.
• Users installing Nix from the Determinate macOS package are now notified in more cases if MDM prevents mounting volumes.

And finally, we also shipped a number of reliability improvements for the Determinate installer:

• We can now tolerate and mount the Nix Store APFS volume if it’s unlocked but not yet mounted.
• Uninstalling Determinate now cleans up the generated nix.conf file.
• Invalid or corrupted nix.conf files no longer block installation or upgrades.
• Creating /etc/profiles.d/nix.sh now creates /etc/profiles.d if it doesn’t exist already.
• The installation process is now far more resilient to strange behavior on XFS while unpacking the Nix tarball.

To upgrade Determinate now:

sudo determinate-nixd upgrade

If you aren’t using Determinate yet, check out our getting started guides for organizations and individuals.