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Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

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Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#101

Post by trelane »

davexunit wrote: post #66
trelane wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equivalently, what you're saying is that the world got more dependent on secret, proprietary software, and that therefore those who wish to have freer systems should just give up.

This is a very bad faith interpretation of what I wrote.

How is

"the world got more dependent on secret, proprietary software, and that therefore those who wish to have freer systems should just give up."

a "bad faith interpretation" of

"10 years ago it was not too hard to run a distro without firmware blobs on a laptop if you were cool with just getting a thinkpad, but modern intel hardware requires a blob for graphics so even that path is closed now. My 2022 thinkpad x1 needs blobs for graphics, wifi, bluetooth, and sound and I tried to find something modern that didn't need them and gave up eventually."

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#102

Post by zilti »

eecc wrote: post #89

HOWEVER, and I hope this is a transient situation, there is a problem: in GNOME, applications that aren’t native Wayland apps don’t scale nicely. It’s like the app gets rendered to a texture at the original resolution, which then gets scaled up in a blurry way. Unfortunately that's how it works on all Linux distros since "this will be the year of Wayland". Last time I tried it was 2020, and I gave up when it turned o…

It simply does not matter, because all DEs are on Wayland now, everything supports it, and honestly, I haven't seen an application not supporting Wayland for quite some time. Even Chrome is Wayland-native now.

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#103

Post by bmicraft »

slgeorge wrote: post #84
graemep wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Guix is a rolling release distribution, the versions of each application are updated continuously. The benefit of rolling releases is that enhancements are available immediately" The last time I looked at Guix a lot of packages were not up to date, and this included security updates for internet facing things (IIRC, one of the major web servers).

New packages and updates to packages come into the archive continuously. For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated - https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/ . Advantage of this is that you can use new packages immediately and there's no big 'upgrade'. Challenges are that if you were an enterprise and wanted to stick on an 'old' version this wouldn't the right distribution. Gu…

> For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated

That's really doesn't feel like a lot. 40 is oughly equal to the amount I get daily for just the stuff that's installed on my arch system.

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#104

Post by e12e »

> ... good compilation speed ...

And earlier:

> open /etc/config.scm, add the needed lines as described in the operating-system part of the nonguix README, reconfigure, and reboot. Building Linux takes a little less than an hour on this machine.

This is for a system bootstrap of guix/Linux - not just the kernel and modules, surely?

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#105

Post by graemep »

slgeorge wrote: post #84
graemep wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Guix is a rolling release distribution, the versions of each application are updated continuously. The benefit of rolling releases is that enhancements are available immediately" The last time I looked at Guix a lot of packages were not up to date, and this included security updates for internet facing things (IIRC, one of the major web servers).

New packages and updates to packages come into the archive continuously. For example, in roughly the last 24 hours 40 packages were added or updated - https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/log/ . Advantage of this is that you can use new packages immediately and there's no big 'upgrade'. Challenges are that if you were an enterprise and wanted to stick on an 'old' version this wouldn't the right distribution. Gu…

I do like rolling release distros. I currently use Manjaro and the ARM version of Arch. However, what I really want something like this for is clients servers - not exactly "enterprise" as these are SMEs (not tiny, but not enterprise either).

I did find CVE-2024-0985 was not fixed in Guix, but overall so far other things seem to be up to date than when I last looked at it.

What is your usage? I suppose the other thing it might really good for is a developer desktop?

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#106

Post by slgeorge »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #96
slgeorge wrote: post #60

For those that don't know Guix can be used as: * a package manager on top of an existing Linux distribution (think apt or rpm) * a development environment (think Python venv but for any language) * a VM system (like Docker but declarative) * a Linux distribution (similar to Nix) It's a small and friendly community - we recently started an English-speaking online user-group: https://www.meetup.com/guix-london/ Next me…

> a Linux distribution (similar to Nix) I'm pretty sure all of these are like nix, right? I've used nix on top of other distros, the development environment thing is like nix-shell, nix is happy to build container images, and of course there's nixos.

Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions.

My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So GuixNix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc).

Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (and Nix?) directly integrates configuration management into the OS, rather than as some adjunct piece of tooling (Ansible, Terraform etc). We define the packages, the system, the configuration using the same DSL. Transactions and a declarative approach improve maintainability, reproduciblity and might limit the amount of time I spend messing with different tooling ;-)

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#107

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rekado wrote: post #94
pasc1878 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although if you look at FSFs major projects Emacs and gcc they do run on many OSs including non-free (e.g. Solaris, macOS, Windows, VMS and virtually anything that exists) and other free Unixes. GUIX is much much more restricted.

If you mean the Microsoft project called "GUIX": sure, it's rather restricted. Guix, however, goes out of its way to support extensions at different levels of its architecture. Not only can you extend it with channels, local files, and with Guile expressions, you can also rewrite the dependency graph of your environment with package transformations, e.g. to swap out any instance of Tensorflow with a CUDA-tainted vari…

I won't disagree that guix can be made to use nonfree packages. However, the claim:

>> Although if you look at FSFs major projects Emacs and gcc they do run on many OSs including non-free (e.g. Solaris, macOS, Windows, VMS and virtually anything that exists) and other free Unixes.

>> GUIX is much much more restricted.

appears to hold up; https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/ says "Alternately, GNU Guix can be installed as an additional package manager on top of an installed Linux-based system." (emphasis mine) and although there's no explicit statement, https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html implicitly reiterates that guix is only targeting Linux. Forget running on Solaris, Darwin, or NT; as far as I can tell guix doesn't even care about being usable on any open source unix other than Linux.

Edit: Although now that I think about it, they also target HURD... which is no less niche, but does at least imply that it could work on non-Linux unixen.

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#108

Post by Filligree »

zilti wrote: post #102
eecc wrote: post #89

HOWEVER, and I hope this is a transient situation, there is a problem: in GNOME, applications that aren’t native Wayland apps don’t scale nicely. It’s like the app gets rendered to a texture at the original resolution, which then gets scaled up in a blurry way. Unfortunately that's how it works on all Linux distros since "this will be the year of Wayland". Last time I tried it was 2020, and I gave up when it turned o…

It simply does not matter, because all DEs are on Wayland now, everything supports it, and honestly, I haven't seen an application not supporting Wayland for quite some time. Even Chrome is Wayland-native now.

You don't run Discord, I take it...

Meanwhile, it's apparently going to change soon, but Steam games generally use Xwayland.

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#109

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

slgeorge wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a Linux distribution (similar to Nix) I'm pretty sure all of these are like nix, right? I've used nix on top of other distros, the development environment thing is like nix-shell, nix is happy to build container images, and of course there's nixos.

Yes, I wasn't throwing shade on Nix, I was drawing a specific comparison about Linux distributions. My opinion is that Guix/Nix move the state of the art for Linux distributions forward. So Guix Nix are both similar Linux distributions, and different from previous approaches (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc). Transactional package management and declarative system configuration solve a whole host of problems. Guix (a…

Ah, yes, in that case we're in full agreement:) There are pain points yet, but I already find it slightly painful to use a non-declarative system...

Re: Guix on the Framework 13 AMD

#110

Post by Filligree »

kdtsh wrote: post #13
goosedragons wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big thing is that being a FSF project they are much more committed to free software than Nix. It's harder to get stuff like Chrome, Steam, Nvidia drivers etc. Not impossible but you're definitely swimming against the current in trying.

Important to note that it’s not hard or swimming against the current - you just use the nonguix channel, which has all of those things and is a perfectly acceptable use of the system (it’s what channels are for) - but it’s not in the default installation.

It's (deliberately) difficult to discover. I tried GuixSD once, and bounced off it because of the apparent lack of support for my hardware, CUDA, Pytorch et al, which isn't an uncommon story apparently.

Now, seemingly there are channels that would deal with this. But when I asked through the official channels, I was told not to do that -- that is, "don't use nvidia dummy", which really isn't an option. I was never pointed to the non-free channel.

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