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This is a complete denial of reality, of course, and at the cost of the user. Religious dogma, as you put it, seems like an apt description.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's updated when you update all your other packages. It's no different from updating your shell or your desktop environment.
but i am aware when those updates happen and what they are. they are not automatic or hidden
> 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.
I guess that in their mind, they're producing code for some utopic x86 system that does not have non-open microcode baked in, in which case their approach would be right. This is a complete denial of reality, of course, and at the cost of the user. Religious dogma, as you put it, seems like an apt description.
But since reality doesn't care about their refusal to adapt, and they can't just throw their hands up in the air and say nothing is free any more and you should just live off the grid and reject all technology, they instead have built a deliberately obtuse set of rules to declare certain things out of scope, so they can maintain the illusion of freedom for their followers while making concessions behind the scenes (and even actively working with manufacturers to devise silly workarounds that fit into that framework, see e.g. the Librem 5's ridiculous secondary CPU core and external flash dance so they can claim the RAM training blob doesn't make their device non-free).
Then they're very careful to never talk about this unless prompted; the fewer people know about all these secret blobs they're running anyway, the better. It's basically cult-like behavior - this kind of control of the information and narrative that followers get is a defining characteristic.
None of this helps users, of course; what would help users would be being informed about not just exactly what blobs exist, but what the risks are, how they might affect their privacy and security, what update options exist, and whether they can be audited or replaced with free versions in the future. But the FSF doesn't care about any of that. They just want to pretend they live in a blob-free utopia.
Edit: Ah, the downvotes have started. I guess the FSF fans have showed up. I hope you're not using an off the shelf mouse to click on the downvote button; those all run proprietary USB HID firmware.
I guess that in their mind, they're producing code for some utopic x86 system that does not have non-open microcode baked in, in which case their approach would be right. This is a complete denial of reality, of course, and at the cost of the user. Religious dogma, as you put it, seems like an apt description.
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.
It's not, at least not necessarily.
Let's say you try to change your system configuration and you fuck it up, you revert, with zfs your attempt is gone, or you have to go and hunt it down in the snapshot if you remembered to store that.
With nix/guix it's still there to be updated.
An other component is the intentionality of decisions: in nix/guix you can reach a point where the setup of the entire system is fully described and reproducible, in fact there are people who rebuild the machine "from scratch" (really from the nix store) on every boot, to ensure the system does not accumulate transient cruft.
I guess that in their mind, they're producing code for some utopic x86 system that does not have non-open microcode baked in, in which case their approach would be right. This is a complete denial of reality, of course, and at the cost of the user. Religious dogma, as you put it, seems like an apt description.
Their approach is firmly stuck in the computing paradigm of the 70s and 80s, much like Stallman is personally stuck in the social narrative of the same era. The FSF and him refuse to change and adapt to the times. But since reality doesn't care about their refusal to adapt, and they can't just throw their hands up in the air and say nothing is free any more and you should just live off the grid and reject all technol…
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"?
Alternatively you can create derivations instead in which case the resulting artefacts will be fully understood and manageable by nix (I think there are integrations to do that e.g. tools like carnix which can automatically create derivations from existing language-specific packages, not sure if there's one for pip/pypi).
I guess that in their mind, they're producing code for some utopic x86 system that does not have non-open microcode baked in, in which case their approach would be right. This is a complete denial of reality, of course, and at the cost of the user. Religious dogma, as you put it, seems like an apt description.
why is it a religious dogma? i dont see the point of hostility. they have every right to hold to those principles as long as they are not deciving anyone and state their values clearly. who are they harming?
If they were being honest, they would tell people that this dongle has a good half a megabyte or so of proprietary Bluetooth stack built-in (with runtime patching/update ability; they all do), and they wouldn't deceptively have a "TET-BT4 source code" link that makes it sound like the firmware is open, while it's actually just a tarball of the Linux kernel (which contains a generic Bluetooth controller driver, nothing specific to this device).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, what happens if you incidentally run pip on a Nix system? Will it mess up your installation?