~/.local belonged to root

[thblt]

This may or may not be related to the Nix Installer. I had an issue with nix-darwin that was caused by my ~/.local belonging to root, preventing nix to create a user profile.

I suspect this is caused by the ~/.local directory being initially created by a program running in sudo, because sudo in macos preserves $HOME.

It is possible this program was related to determinate nix, because the only contents in that root-owned ~/.local had a name related to determinate systems (something with id and determinate in its name, I’m sorry I didn’t write it down, and I deleted the dir instead of chown-ing it)

I understand this is really not enough info, I’m reporting it anyway because this may be an uncommon case where the installer runs on a Mac system that doesn’t already have a ~/.local.

[edude03]

Just ran into this as well. Brand new Mac first thing I did was install det nix, second was to (attempt to) install HM. I used the det nix installer package instead of curl for what its worth

[putz612]

This just happened to me as well. Fresh mac mini install determinate nix was one of the first apps that I installed. Nothing that a sudo chown -r could not fix but it did throw me for a loop.