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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

#91

Post by m1keil »

jordanbeiber wrote: post #22
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.

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?…

> 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.

Could you elaborate on this? If I have state that works on v1 and after upgrade to v2 the state is now non backward compatible to v1, how nix (or guix) can help? As far as I can tell, in such case a fs rollback is better solution.

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

#92

Post by nicce »

Gentil wrote: post #33
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…

Good points made by others. But another thing is you don't have to? Nix(OS)/Guix installs packages and dependencies separately instead of replacing packages like other OS/package managers do. This means you have multiple versions of a package installed in your system and that you can use them simultaneously for different applications if I understand it right. You can move back and forth between versions if one breaks…

Rolling release cycle is enabled by this indeed. A major benefit what other distributions can’t have without containers.

You just nees to know which versions introduce major API changes etc. and you are fine.

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

#93

Post by geokon »

solatic wrote: post #29
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…

Nix has a stable channel (six-month release cadence, with one month of support overlap), which isn't LTS, and even just the stable channel is "expensive" enough to be difficult for the project to justify. Supporting LTS has a genuine non-trivial cost in engineering man-hours. Nix has the technological underpinnings to make it easier to support LTS, in theory, but in all likelihood there won't be an LTS channel withou…

I guess what I don't get is, wouldn't an LTS be way way easier to maintain than a rolling, constantly breaking, release. Heck, id even prolly go through the effort of maintain my own software as a package if it's something I could do once every few years over a stable base. They could even make life easy and match version numbers with whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is using. And people that'd need newer libs/bins could statically link whatever they need or provide whatever they want separately on top of that stable base (sorta like what PPAs do)

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

#94

Post by atdrummond »

medo-bear wrote: post #83
marcan_42 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of that exception, the way it is implemented, the way they work with vendors to help them fit into it, and the way they do not require informing users of such secondary processors are all deceptive. Just look at the Librem 5. That CPU needs a blob to even boot (to train the RAM). Normally that would just be embedded into the bootloader. But that would make it evident in the build process for their boot…

not knowing about https://ryf.fsf.org/ previously, i managed to find and understand their certification process within a matter of ten minutes. if i was a user of these products i don't think i would feel decieved

Is the poster you’re replying to saying anything about the ease of parsing their policy? He doesn’t seem to be calling it confusing. Rather, he seems to be attacking the supposed (il)logic of its contentions and the resulting consequences.

At the moment this back and forth feels like you’re talking past his actual point(s).

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

#95

Post by wiz21c »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

> Guix System is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system. It uses the Linux-libre kernel It's worth pointing out that the linux-libre kernel is developed under the FSF doctrine that "binary blobs are bad unless you can't see them". This has been taken to its logical extreme here, where this Linux fork actively removes security warnings informing users that they need to update their CPU microcode , becaus…

> arbitrary religious dogma

"arbitrary political view"

there's a difference, it matters.

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

#96

Post by medo-bear »

atdrummond wrote: post #94
medo-bear wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not knowing about https://ryf.fsf.org/ previously, i managed to find and understand their certification process within a matter of ten minutes. if i was a user of these products i don't think i would feel decieved

Is the poster you’re replying to saying anything about the ease of parsing their policy? He doesn’t seem to be calling it confusing. Rather, he seems to be attacking the supposed (il)logic of its contentions and the resulting consequences. At the moment this back and forth feels like you’re talking past his actual point(s).

no. he is calling it deceptive, which is even stronger than confusing. his statement was:

> They are deceiving people into believing they are not running proprietary software

edit: as regards FSF's logic i am not informed enough to comment so i didnt. but the conversation (this thread) was definitely about deceptiveness

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

#97

Post by 3836293648 »

amelius wrote: post #70
opan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, makes sense. Does that mean that you don't get the latest updates that are available in pip? Also, what happens if you incidentally run pip on a Nix system? Will it mess up your installation?

I can't speak for pip, but cargo, rust's package manager, packages disappear on reboot. Doesn't matter for development since libraries are stored with your project, but any tools you install via cargo are gone

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

#98

Post by detuur »

rightbyte wrote: post #85
marcan_42 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's all about controlling users' access to hardware and software to fulfill some imaginary "freedom" ideal that doesn't actually have any relevance in reality. Stallman personally refused to certify bunnie's Novena laptop (a fully open hardware and software laptop) as "Respects your Freedom" because there were no free drivers for the GPU, and although it wasn't going to ship with GPU acceleration (that's option…

> a few years later, open drivers for that GPU were developed So ... FSF made the right call? What is the point of the certification of a device if there are no drivers for it.

The wrong call, because you can only reasonably develop drivers for uncrippled GPUs. The FSF was so caught up in maintaining a freedom from being _tempted_ to use proprietary software, that their solution would've taken away the freedom to develop your own free software.

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

#99

Post by wiz21c »

marcan_42 wrote: post #64
ckastner wrote: post #61

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…

God doesn't exist, that doesn't prevent him of being.

The quest for freedom is, of course, an idealistic one. The important thing is that, in their fight to promote freedom, they meet obstacles. Those friction points reveal the lack of freedom. And so, although they don't reach freedom, they actually show that freedom is limited.

IOW, refusing the statu quo is one of the way to change it.

You should look at history and look at how much freedom you have, how much protection you have, etc. and then ask yourself : where does it come from ?

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

#100

Post by angio »

kohlerm wrote: post #19
pxc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be fair, the appeal of Nix (and Guix) to me is that it's very easy to create binary packages of applications I use. Coming from Fedora, it takes minutes to create new packages compared to hours with RPM.
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