It wasn't for nothing • Hacker News Board

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#31

Post by flatbub » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #23

flatbub wrote: post #9

Nice! Bravo for your contributions! After using and contributing NixOS for 3 years, I appreciated that I understood far more how Guix worked after just one 1-2 weeks of using it. Guix introduces abstractions, such as operating-system that has defined fields that make it clearer what structures are being built. NixOS, on the other hand, does not have such abstractions (or perhaps just not as well documented/discoverab…

> Guix introduces abstractions, such as operating-system that has defined fields that make it clearer what structures are being built. NixOS, on the other hand, does not have such abstractions (or perhaps just not as well documented/discoverable). NixOS had plenty of abstractions, so I don't quite understand this. All of NixOS is a compilation of abstractions for building an operating system environment. Could you el…

AFAICT, NixOS has no equivalent to the type https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/operating_002dsyste... , which makes it clear what an OS contains, and allows you to query the OS.

Instead, NixOS has many options, whose only structure is that they form a tree. When trying to understand a host, it's unclear how to begin to analyze this tree: no option is at a higher level of abstraction than any other, or if it is, it's difficult to infer that.

Arguably I could just look at my host's config, and that will tell me what this host does, but it doesn't. It actually describes my how machine differs from the default NixOS machine. (How do I learn what a default NixOS machine do? Query for all services "enabled" option is set to true?)

With Guix, I follow the code: how is this host's OS "services" field populated.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#32

Post by mkl » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

sweetbitter wrote: post #16

@dang Am I banned from replies? Why? Because I comment through Tor? Is there a better way to ask this without polluting a comment section?

There's also a limit on how quickly you can reply to a new comment. The reply link is missing at first, but you can get it on the comment's page by clicking the timestamp.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#33

Post by hosh » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly.

Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism have their own issues).

It’s not that I am a purist. Nix is still more practical. I have also heard that Nix and Guix can run on the same machine. However, I think Guix and Free Software conserve principles that I think are important for our society and civilization.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#34

Post by ivalm » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

caslon wrote: post #30

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt th…

> but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog

> couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat

This seems like an unnecessarily hostile response, kind of inline with what the OP mentioned.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#35

Post by klardotsh » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

I think much like how there's Nix and NixOS, it's important to draw a line between Guix (the package manager) and GuixSD (the Linux distribution).

Guix the package manager, while still not usable at work for me (lack of MacOS support - just 4 of my eng org's ~25 folks use Linux), is full of interesting ideas and features that work well in Linux settings, and can do useful things. It could make interesting dev shells, for example, much like nix-shell (or Flakes).

GuixSD without `nonguix`? Yeah, I unfortunately share your "it's dead in the water" opinion here. I'm not aware of much, if any, modern hardware that can fully boot to a usable-framerate GUI with networking (and that is also safe to use for such) without at least linux-firmware, which I believe is only available in nonguix. If there's exceptions to this, I'd genuinely love to hear them in a thread here.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#36

Post by k__ » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:18 AM UTC

hosh wrote: post #33

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

I personally didn't use Guix or interacted with its community in any way.

But if GP is right about their attitude, it saddens me.

Can't there be a middle ground? Like, promoting free software and still helping people getting things done in the world we live right now?

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#37

Post by xhevahir » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:22 AM UTC

caslon wrote: post #30

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt th…

To continue with your analogy: this sounds more like instructing other vegetarians to refuse to help any meat eaters who would like to alter a vegetarian recipe.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#38

Post by xyzzyz » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

hosh wrote: post #33

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism…

Richard Stallman was right in the same sense Karl Marx was right. The people would, in fact, be better off if each have according to his abilities, and received according to his needs.

The problem here is the problem of incentives: you can state your desired end goal (prosperous communism, or free software utopia), but there is no mechanism to get there from here, and even if you somehow do get there, no mechanism to preserve that state without all encompassing coercion.

Moreover, the lack of incentives results in lack of prosperity: if there is little incentive to produce a lot (like in capitalism, where your profit grows with volume), people produce just enough to get by, plus some for individual entertainment. I’m sure Guix is good enough for the author’s needs! The problem is to get people to do things that nobody really wants to do. Who will build free software Salesforce? In capitalism, we do that by paying people money to do things they wouldn’t want to do for free. In fact, same is true in free and open source software: I can really only name a handful of projects that are widely used and of high quality that have not been largely funded by commercial world: OpenSSH, some other BSD stuff, what else?

Since commercial businesses want to use these things alongside their proprietary stuff, they necessarily cannot constitute part of pure (in free software sense) distributions. Thus, if you aim for purity, you either end up with shoddy quality, or depend on the largesse of the non-pure activities. This is analogous to modern welfare state, which can only function by skimming the value created by advanced commercial economies, and only to an extent that doesn’t actually choke them altogether.

In short, incentives matter.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#39

Post by caslon » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

xhevahir wrote: post #37

caslon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt th…

To continue with your analogy: this sounds more like instructing other vegetarians to refuse to help any meat eaters who would like to alter a vegetarian recipe.

It's more like saying "Not in my house, thanks."

Which is totally sensible!

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#40

Post by sierkov » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:26 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #25

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix…

> I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS.

I'm using Guix for work, at home, my wife has Guix on her gaming laptop with nvidia card, playing games on steam. Nobody has any problems with enabling rpmfusion repo on Fedora, using aur on Arch, adding backports repo for kde or whatever on ubuntu. But as soon as it's nonguix channel it's suddenly a problem. Huh. It's literally just a channel and ultimately it is still same Guix.

"What's that? NONGUIX? Hell no, I ain't having Guix working on my hardware! I don't want a better experience using Guix! Not in a million years!" And then:

> Guix has truly noble goals (in classic GNU fashion) but they're ultimately misguided.

> Actually useless.

Which are really big claims with nothing to back them up.

> The standard encouraged response to "Hi I'm a new Guix user and I was wondering how I can run steam?" is roughly equivalent to "Go fuck yourself" and I'm just amazed by that.

Look, if you can't figure out how to `guix install flatpak' and then flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam, then... well, I've nothing to say actually.