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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

#161

Post by podiki »

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…

To add to what others have said, a benefit of this type of distro is you can always go to a specific point in time of your configuration and packages. So if it has worked, it will continue to work, while you can upgrade or change other parts in a separable manner.

In a more interesting note, I wrote an aside about grafts, which are a way of providing changes to packages without rebuilding (often to graft in a security fix to a library the package uses). So you can keep a configuration of packages you like and graft on security fixes while staying on the same version. There are some caveats about when you can do this of course (ABI compatibility mainly), but is some cool technology, to me.

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

#162

Post by podiki »

Gentil wrote: post #32

I moved to NixOS and came back to Arch because setting up development environments for general purpose computing felt tricky. I was on a schedule so had to drop it. Is it the same for Guix? I don't know why it should be any different. But still asking. Also, am guessing people will likely have hardware compatibility issues for Guix which isn't a problem for NixOS since they bundle non-free drivers etc.

Not sure what kind of development environments you mean, but one of the great features of Guix (and Nix I think) is to easily provide isolated environments. This can help you control dependencies and other things separately from the main OS. In guix this is as easy as `guix shell some packages` or add a `-D` for development libraries needed for those packages instead. You can then easily reproduce the same environment on another machine.

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

#163

Post by podiki »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #110

Just an anecdote, I accidentally broke something in my Guix system config but I couldn't figure out how to debug the scheme errors, and I had to reinstall

We can definitely improve the error reporting (e.g. just the other day there was a patch to better improve error reporting in a system configuration to go directly to the configuration line rather than the system that uses that code). Submitting bugs with unhelpful error messages to Guix and/or Guile developers is much appreciated I hear.

However, it should be hard to break a Guix system, since you can always roll back. Of course you can find a way (I changed an ext4 flag that turns out Grub doesn't like, but that has nothing to do with Guix), but as long as you let Guix do its job and try not to manually work around it, you should be able to undo everything. Of course nothing is perfect, but I hope you reported it. In my experience the Guix devs and community is keen to improve.

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

#164

Post by mbakke »

raverbashing wrote: post #103
kzhukov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for some people loading an arbitrary binary code without possibility to check what's inside it is a critical security issue as well.

Yeah. Then these geniuses get bitten by Spectre/Meltdown because they were too scared of running the microcode update. For real. I agree, if that's the position of Guix, I don't want it in my machine.

Guix will never prevent you from doing what you want with your hardware. Nor will it give you software that is not properly free (as in freedom).

The "nonguix" channel mentioned in the article does have Intel and AMD microcode for users who want it. This is similar to Debian, where you have to opt-in by enabling the "nonfree" repository and "apt install" the microcode package corresponding to your CPU.

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

#165

Post by javert »

marcan_42 wrote: post #82
kzhukov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for some people loading an arbitrary binary code without possibility to check what's inside it is a critical security issue as well.

Those people are already running arbitrary binary code without the possibility to check what's inside, it's just that it was loaded before purchase. If you don't trust Intel's updates, then you also can't trust their CPUs in the first place.

Intel hardware definitely cannot be trusted. Probably "good enough" for most people, but it's honestly garbage, security wise.

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

#166

Post by opan »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #110

Just an anecdote, I accidentally broke something in my Guix system config but I couldn't figure out how to debug the scheme errors, and I had to reinstall

You couldn't boot an older system generation and then fetch its version of the config to get back to a working state?

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

#167

Post by podiki »

hyperstar wrote: post #108

I tried installing Guix System maybe about a year ago, but had problems with LVM on LUKS with full-disk encryption and missing and outdated documentation. Has this situation changed?

I haven't done that setup but I know various people that use Guix (on the IRC channel) have an encrypted setup. I'm not sure their exact file structure, but it in general full disk encryption is supported; any issues should be bugs. You can always ask on the IRC channel to get a feel of what people have done and anything that might be tricky.

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

#169

Post by assbuttbuttass »

opan wrote: post #166
assbuttbuttass wrote: post #110

Just an anecdote, I accidentally broke something in my Guix system config but I couldn't figure out how to debug the scheme errors, and I had to reinstall

You couldn't boot an older system generation and then fetch its version of the config to get back to a working state?

I'm not sure how to get an old version of the config from the store. I tried searching for *configuration.scm but nothing showed up
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