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Attempting to Use GNU Guix

zge.us.to

11–20 of 50 posts

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#11
i feel very alienated by the guix developers due to the way they are betraying the gnu leadership.

This is sad because it is such a nice and important project. But I cannot easily separate the work from the people who did it.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#12
post #7
post #4

Thank you for shedding light on a distro I didn't know existed! One tip: The contrast on your code blocks is terrible with white text against a light white background. Consider changing the `background` of line 3 of style.css to `purple`, `darkorange`, or some other dark color.

Seems like normal Solarized to me?

It's broken for dark mode due to a `body { color: white }` rule in style.css. The code block background is not overridden so it remains light yellow while the text is white.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#13

i feel very alienated by the guix developers due to the way they are betraying the gnu leadership. This is sad because it is such a nice and important project. But I cannot easily separate the work from the people who did it.

Yep... I don't really want to interface with morally corrupt people. Fortunately NixOS exists.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#14
post #6

Sad to see GNU Guix struggling, they are young though and I have hopes for the future. About a year ago I made a choice between trying out GNU Guix and NixOS, since this week I now run NixOS on all my servers and desktops after gradually phasing out my old Ubuntu stack. It has generally been smooth sailing, with the occasional hick up that required me to draw upon my general Unix skills. What caught me off guard is h…

[deleted]

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#15
I don't know that much about Guix, other than "super-free Nix with scheme" (and the article wasn't particularly illuminating other than boiling down to "Guix isn't really ready for most users right now"), but it's neat that there's momentum in the declarative OS-space. I hope that both Guix and NixOS keep growing and that more people start switching.

After switching to NixOS, I'd find it very frustrating to go back to an OS with imperative-style package/service management. It's clearly the better way.

A frustrating thing about NixOS--coming from Arch Linux and being used to the AUR--is that adding packages/updating packages can be a bit slow due to the sheer volume of PRs/Issues on the nixpkgs repo. There's always the NUR[1] but it hasn't picked up that much momentum yet (probably because it's kind of hard to search the darn thing). Eitherway, the packages are just Nix expressions and repos are just collections of these expressions, so nothing's preventing a real AUR alternative other than momentum.

It's interesting that Guix uses scheme instead of a home-baked configuration language like NixOS. While I don't find Nix particularly offensive, I don't find it particularly great either. And maybe this is naivity/Nix-inexperience on my part speaking, but I really wish that Nix had a proper type system and was strictly typed.

I guess my pipe dream is "HaskellOS" that's basically NixOS configured with Haskell (just think of xmonad-style configuration for your whole OS). That'd be really nice. And my secondary-pipe dream is a baked in, extremely-comprehensive home-manager[2] so we can bid dotfiles goodbye once and for all and have your entire system-state defined in a single file.

Maybe one day :)

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/NUR

[2] https://github.com/rycee/home-manager

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#16

i feel very alienated by the guix developers due to the way they are betraying the gnu leadership. This is sad because it is such a nice and important project. But I cannot easily separate the work from the people who did it.

> they are betraying the gnu leadership

What do you mean?

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#17

I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these wil…

True for workstations, but most services are running on VMs these days. OS shouldn't need blobs to run on VMs.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#18

I don't know that much about Guix, other than "super-free Nix with scheme" (and the article wasn't particularly illuminating other than boiling down to "Guix isn't really ready for most users right now"), but it's neat that there's momentum in the declarative OS-space. I hope that both Guix and NixOS keep growing and that more people start switching. After switching to NixOS, I'd find it very frustrating to go back t…

It's probably more similar to NixOps, but there is

https://propellor.branchable.com/

http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/unifying_OS_installation_and_co... kinda talks about this sort of thing

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#20
post #9

> For a new package to be accepted into the [Debian] stable branch, it has to pass a number of days without any bug reports. Um, that's not even remotely close to what the actual stable inclusion rules look like.

It is close to the rules for a package to get included into 'testing' from unstable, they must have gotten the branches mixed up.
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