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I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

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Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#11

Post by pxc »

srvmshr wrote: post #4

> In short, GNU Guix is both a package manager you can use in any distro and a full-fledged GNU/Linux distribution, that is modern and advanced Why not just use Nix, which is more battle tested?

As a NixOS user who has (recently!) played with Guix, I don't think ‘battle testing’ is a great reason to prefer Nix.

Guix has an excellent CLI and awesome docs. It's stable and plenty usable. All being in one, high-level language like Scheme makes it seem really easy to hack on, and I think that's part of why its CLI is so good already.

Nix is faster, it supports macOS, and its package collection is much bigger because it's older. But Guix seems great to me, too! If you think you might like it, try it.

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#13

Post by earthscienceman »

A question that nags me every time Guix comes up, or nix, is about the benefits relative to a normal distro on something like ZFS. Are reproducible builds ever going to be all that important to a user? Rollbacks seem like the key feature here and that seems much better left up to the filesystem, not the package tools. This way your storage is also aware of what you're doing.

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#14

Post by jacobmischka »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #8
rowanG077 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using NixOS on my last two laptops without issue. One was a Surface Pro which required a custom kernel and right now I have an XPS 13. Proton runs fine as well.

I'm assuming the kernel you're referring to is the one from the linux-surface project? If so, which model and configuration of Surface Pro were you using? Were you ever able to get LTE, touchscreen, and pen to work? How is the battery life? Is your XPS 13 the latest revision (i.e. 9310)? If it is, how does Nix handle sleep since Intel had removed S3 support?

If you're curious about XPS support in general, I use Arch and force S3 on my 9380 [1] and it works fine, also slightly worse battery when sleeping than ideal (loses about 5-10% in 24 hours, or so), but fine.

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dell_XPS_13_(9370)#Sleep

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#15

Post by pxc »

earthscienceman wrote: post #13

A question that nags me every time Guix comes up, or nix, is about the benefits relative to a normal distro on something like ZFS. Are reproducible builds ever going to be all that important to a user? Rollbacks seem like the key feature here and that seems much better left up to the filesystem, not the package tools. This way your storage is also aware of what you're doing.

> Are reproducible builds ever going to be all that important to a user?

Being able to take your setup with you to a new computer is pretty cool, right?

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#16

Post by masklinn »

srvmshr wrote: post #4

> In short, GNU Guix is both a package manager you can use in any distro and a full-fledged GNU/Linux distribution, that is modern and advanced Why not just use Nix, which is more battle tested?

Author is a lisper, is a good reason.

And while nix may be battle tested that doesn’t translate to a good experience, the learning curve is high and the documentation while plentiful is not really good or helpful to beginners. Plus the entire thing is in flux right now between flakes, home-manager, and a desire to kill nix-env.

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#17

Post by MarcScott »

earthscienceman wrote: post #13

A question that nags me every time Guix comes up, or nix, is about the benefits relative to a normal distro on something like ZFS. Are reproducible builds ever going to be all that important to a user? Rollbacks seem like the key feature here and that seems much better left up to the filesystem, not the package tools. This way your storage is also aware of what you're doing.

The main selling point for me, on NixOS is the ability to switch machines easily, and know that I'm basically using an identical build. Throw your config files onto GitHub or a flash drive, then do whatever you want on your desktop. Want to switch to your laptop? Pull any changes down, do a quick rebuild, and you have an identical system. If you buy a new machine, just install nix, pull down your config files and you're good to go. It used to take me hours to set up a new device, often relying on carefully crafted bash scripts, to try and replicate builds, that needed to be constantly maintained. Not any more.

BTW, I rarely rollback, and if I do it's because I've monumentality fucked something up, which is a great feature.

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#18

Post by dane-pgp »

earthscienceman wrote: post #13

A question that nags me every time Guix comes up, or nix, is about the benefits relative to a normal distro on something like ZFS. Are reproducible builds ever going to be all that important to a user? Rollbacks seem like the key feature here and that seems much better left up to the filesystem, not the package tools. This way your storage is also aware of what you're doing.

Reproducible builds are an important part of efforts to secure the software supply chain. Ideally you want multiple independent parties vouching that a given package (whether a compiled binary, or a source tarball) corresponds to a globally immutably published revision in a source code repository.

That gives you Binary Transparency, which is already being attempted in the Arch Linux package ecosystem[0], and it protects the user from compromised build environments and software updates that are targeted at a specific user or that occur without upstream's knowledge.

Once updates can be tied securely to version control tags, it is possible to add something like Crev[1] to allow distributed auditing of source code changes. That still leaves open the questions of who to trust for audits, and how to fund that auditing work, but it greatly mitigates other classes of attack.

[0] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

[1] https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#19

Post by kohlerm »

pxc wrote: post #11
srvmshr wrote: post #4

> In short, GNU Guix is both a package manager you can use in any distro and a full-fledged GNU/Linux distribution, that is modern and advanced Why not just use Nix, which is more battle tested?

As a NixOS user who has (recently!) played with Guix, I don't think ‘battle testing’ is a great reason to prefer Nix. Guix has an excellent CLI and awesome docs. It's stable and plenty usable. All being in one, high-level language like Scheme makes it seem really easy to hack on, and I think that's part of why its CLI is so good already. Nix is faster, it supports macOS, and its package collection is much bigger beca…

What about number of packages available? Does guix have something comparable to Nix Flakes?

Re: I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro

#20

Post by geokon »

Is there a reason neither Guix nor Nix have made an LTS-type repo?

A rolling release seems at odds with the stability granted by reproducible builds.

Maybe I have a miopic view, but what's nice with Ubuntu LTS is you know everyone and their mothers has built and tested their packages/libraries/executable against the lib versions provided by Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 or whatever. You also know those libs, at their given versions, will get patched as issues come up. If all your libraries are constantly churning then you have no idea of the quality of the libs you're linking to (and that lib's dependencies are also churning in turn). You can pin versions, but there is no guarantee what you're pinning to will be patched and fixed as issues come up

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