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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

#41

Post by ayushnix »

geokon wrote: post #20

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 v…

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

Nix and Guix are already esoteric enough to scare people away, I don't imagine how these projects would be able to reliably manage LTS releases unless they get serious financial support or enough manpower willing to deal with backporting security and bug fixes.

You might wanna look at Fedora Silverblue and the OSTree technology making its way into RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/ALMA etc.

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

#42

Post by opan »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #3
podiki wrote: post #2

Hello, author here, happy to answer questions and discuss! This is the first in more Guix articles coming from me, as I started when building my newest desktop [0]. Next will be more details on exactly how my system is set up, but you can find (somewhat out of date as we work on big updates in Guix) my dot files here [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28628344 [1] https://github.com/podiki/dot.me/tree/mast…

What's your experience with Guix and Nix on laptops? Which among them are sufficiently supported to be daily drivers? Have you tried running Proton on Guix? For someone who is interested in the Guix/Nix ethos but wants to keep Arch, is there anything aside from sentimental reasons that I would be missing by just running the Nix/Guix package managers on top of Arch .

Guix System works great on a ThinkPad T440p besides the default WLAN card. I removed mine for now. If you flash coreboot (to get around the hardware whitelist), you should be able to put in one compatible with linux-libre. There's also the USB dongle solution if you're into that.

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

#44

Post by opan »

amelius wrote: post #38
jordanbeiber wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of things - if the system can handle rollbacks it will be much more reliable than using the fs, as the fs knows nothing about actual state. It knows about blocks commited to disk. Usually they look the same, but not always. Then there’s the question of how exactly you reached this state. Having nixos generations is like having an event stream of all changes. Apply your backup to a new machine, what happens?…

How does Nix work with less sophisticated package managers that run on top of it, e.g. Python's "pip"?

Guix, and I think Nix also, package the things from these other package managers so you can manage them all with the same package manager. This also means features like rollbacks can apply to your emacs packages.

You can run pip on Guix System, but I don't think you'd have to, ideally. Same for rust's cargo and so on.

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

#45

Post by medo-bear »

computer wrote: post #35
amelius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I've never updated my CPU microcode in other distros, nor did I receive warnings about it. Do you have a better example?

Yes you have, it's done automatically.

serious question: why is something that is updated without you knowing about it ok?

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

#46

Post by detaro »

medo-bear wrote: post #45
computer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you have, it's done automatically.

serious question: why is something that is updated without you knowing about it ok?

Same way that it's ok that if you update your distro it fetches newer drivers, a new kernel and patched versions of all the software you installed? Microcode is loaded at runtime, it's not permanently modifying your system.

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

#47

Post by marcan_42 »

medo-bear wrote: post #45
computer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you have, it's done automatically.

serious question: why is something that is updated without you knowing about it ok?

It's updated when you update all your other packages. It's no different from updating your shell or your desktop environment.

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

#48

Post by massysett »

choeger wrote: post #23
geokon wrote: post #20

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 v…

I'd guess a lack of hands. Maintenance is the expensive and boring part of a distro. And seriously, why should an unpaid volunteer help to maintain a stable foundation for all the companies that rely on, e.g., Ubuntu 18.04? I wonder if one could create a business out of supporting such distributions against a comparatively small fee.

I doubt it, folks interested in long-term support can already use Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.

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

#49

Post by input_sh »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I've never updated my CPU microcode in other distros, nor did I receive warnings about it. Do you have a better example?

You might have, without realising it. It's supplied as a package in nearly every distro. Here's the Debian package for the Intel microcode, for example: https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/intel-microcode Debian hides it away in their "non-free" repo but it's in the default install in many other distros.

To add, you can do:

    dmesg | grep "microcode updated early to"
To see when it was last updated.

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

#50

Post by medo-bear »

detaro wrote: post #46
medo-bear wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serious question: why is something that is updated without you knowing about it ok?

Same way that it's ok that if you update your distro it fetches newer drivers, a new kernel and patched versions of all the software you installed? Microcode is loaded at runtime, it's not permanently modifying your system.

but i dont do that automatically, as the parent described. as far as i am aware i need to manually issue a comand to perform the update, which is ok as far as i have that control
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