Reposting because it looks like federation failed.
I was just reading about it, it sounds like a pretty cool OS and package manager. Has anyone actually used it?
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It’s NixOS but more free and with scheme instead of nix
I absolutely love it, and I’m never going back to an ordinary distribution again. I do fine regarding software. I use standard channels, non-free channel, flatpaks and a few appimages. I can’t think of anything i’m missing atmo…
It’s like Nix but has some extra features and uses Scheme instead of a custom language.
That’s barely an opinion, haha! That’s pretty much just what it is.
So I think Guix (and Nix) is the most technologically advanced package manager in existence, and I hope someday all package managers work like Guix.
One other very interesting feature about Guix
(which I don’t think Nix is doing yet)(which Nix also does) is that they have implemented a fully verifiable bootstrap, meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough for a group of humans to check for correctness and safety. Also, every step of the build process exists in the package repository, with no reliance on externally built binaries for anything, not even the C compiler toolchain. They accomplish this with a multi-phase bootstrap process, where a smaller, simpler C compiler is used to build GCC.Do I use Guix? Well, no. Simply put, it is not quite to the point where it just works on a lot of the computer hardware that I own. With a bit more work, with a few more developers, and a bit more money invested, Guix could pretty soon become as reliable and useful as Debian or Fedora. But it is not quite there yet. And frankly, I have other more important things to do than worry about debugging problems with the operating system I am using.
I think that it’s a great project, and I hope it succeeds. My sense is that there is more momentum around Nix, so for a lot of uses it just makes more sense.
Guix and Nix both have the same issue imo, which is using a loosely typed language with an odd syntax. I feel like something both strongly typed and with a more common syntax would be easier to edit and faster to evaluate.
So, I actually learned about Guix via GNU Shepherd. It sounds like NixOS just uses systemd, which I don’t love. Not in a dramatic way, and I’m currently running systemd, but it does break the Unix philosophy.
A Haskell-based package manager would be pretty dope (seeing as that’s the gold standard for that sort of language). I wonder if someone’s working on it.
Shepard? Do you mean Shepherd?
Why yes, future person, I’ll fix the spelling.
I didn’t get an underline because it was capitalised, apparently.
I haven’t gnused it, I probably won’t unless I stop using nixos. I haven’t looked into it much, how different from nixos is guix?
Moderately. Same rough idea, with a few other things in the blend. For example, I found it via GNU Shepard, which it uses, while Nix sounds like it just uses systemd. The Guix package manager will also compile things from source with custom options if it needs.
Using Scheme instead of a purely functional language like Nix as the Nix/Guix expression language is a bold choice I am not sure I agree with.
Using Scheme instead of a purely functional language like Nix as the Nix/Guix expression language is a bold choice I am not sure I agree with.
Scheme is the most functional of all non-purely-functional languages that I know of. What’s more, the parts of Guix in which packages are defined are quite pure, even using monads for some things, so it is really not too different from the Nix language.
It’s actually easier this way because you keep everything in one place.
I edited some file on Ubuntu to merge my audio channels into one because one of my speakers broke. Do you think I know what change I made to what file now? When I update, do you think I can merge my changes with the new file and make everything work? Of course not, I am several years into forgetting what I did
But
configuration.nixis one file, I usually get a deprecation notice for some stuff and just change a line here and there from time to time. All of my changes are in there and they are in git. When I switched to flakes I also addedflake.nixin there, but it’s still just two files in one folder I play around with. Not only that, but the maintainers already gave me the options I need for my services. I don’t have to follow some guide online to set something up, I just enable it and it works immediately.For example, enabling
iwdis:networking.wireless.iwd.enable = true;I just did that and it worked. I commented it out and it went back to whatever the default package is. Is this as easy to toggle back and forth in other distros?
Nobody has mentioned that Guix is readily available on NixOS right now? Add a line to your config and it’s ready to go. Compatible with everything else.
The idea behind it really appeals to me. However, Guix is so niche that I felt like it was not worth the effort to actually daily drive it. I went the NixOS way instead and have been daily driving it now for almost 2years. I’m really satisfied with the paradigm immutable and reproducible os. I also manage my servers this way and it makes it really easy to rollback stuff.
The learning curve is the same as for any language but you have to relearn how to manage an os this way as it can be really different than a trad os. It forces you to really understand for example how packages traditionally expect to link to various libs available on your system.
