Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#1

Post by stargrave » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

Attempting to Use GNU Guix
zge.us.to

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#2

Post by adilsaju » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

asffs

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#3

Post by pmoriarty » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

Guix in general just needs a lot more contributors and lot more work to come anywhere close to being a competitor to the mainstream (or even near-mainstream) distros and package managers.

I'm coming from Gentoo myself, and I've tried to get Guix working on Gentoo a couple of times over the years, and have always been frustrated by how much work and hacking was involved in doing so. I'm no Linux novice, either. I've been a professional Linux/UNIX admin for decades, I know and love Scheme, and am no stranger to putting in a lot of work to get something to run on Linux, but I failed in two major attempts with Guix, despite having lots of thorough assistance from Guix developers on #guix on IRC.

So back to Gentoo's package manager I went.

A typical user would not have put in nearly that much work to trying it out, nor would they have had the skills or knowledge to get nearly as far as I did. Though, to be honest, I did have some requirements (like doing my own compilation of everything on my own old, slow laptop, just as I'd been doing with Gentoo, and not trusting their binary distribution) that a typical user would not.

The other lesson I got from my last attempt was that trying to compile everything in Guix from scratch on an old laptop is just way too slow. Doing this on Gentoo is slow and painful enough, but it's way worse on Guix, and simply unworkable. You really have to have a fast, modern system (or offload your compilation to another machine which will crank away for weeks on end and that you can then download the binaries from) to constantly compile everything you need for Guix.

That said, Guix has really come a long way over the years, and it's impressive to see how far they've come, and I'd absolutely love to see them succeed, but they've got a long, long, long way to go.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#4

Post by p0cc » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

Thank you for shedding light on a distro I didn't know existed!

One tip: The contrast on your code blocks is terrible with white text against a light white background. Consider changing the `background` of line 3 of style.css to `purple`, `darkorange`, or some other dark color.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#5

Post by mmahut » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

Go Nix.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#6

Post by ninjin » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

Sad to see GNU Guix struggling, they are young though and I have hopes for the future. About a year ago I made a choice between trying out GNU Guix and NixOS, since this week I now run NixOS on all my servers and desktops after gradually phasing out my old Ubuntu stack.

It has generally been smooth sailing, with the occasional hick up that required me to draw upon my general Unix skills. What caught me off guard is how having a solid configuration to revert to has made me start tinkering with my operating system again akin to how I did when I started using Linux/BSD in the early 00s. But, enough about NixOS, I hope GNU Guix continues to make progress as there needs to be more competition in this space. If you have an evening to spare, I highly recommend trying a distribution like this out in a VM to get a taste of what it feels like to use it – it is, different… but in a good way.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#7

Post by chaorace » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

p0cc wrote: post #4

Thank you for shedding light on a distro I didn't know existed! One tip: The contrast on your code blocks is terrible with white text against a light white background. Consider changing the `background` of line 3 of style.css to `purple`, `darkorange`, or some other dark color.

Seems like normal Solarized to me?

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#8

Post by MrBingley » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these will sadly limit the appeal of this distribution to enthusiasts-only, which is unfortunate since Guix probably has the most advanced package manager of any Linux system.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#9

Post by jwilk » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

> For a new package to be accepted into the [Debian] stable branch, it has to pass a number of days without any bug reports.

Um, that's not even remotely close to what the actual stable inclusion rules look like.

Re: Attempting to Use GNU Guix

#10

Post by XaspR8d » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

chaorace wrote: post #7

p0cc wrote: post #4

Thank you for shedding light on a distro I didn't know existed! One tip: The contrast on your code blocks is terrible with white text against a light white background. Consider changing the `background` of line 3 of style.css to `purple`, `darkorange`, or some other dark color.

Seems like normal Solarized to me?

Must be rendering differences among us -- I don't think solarized uses white on yellow...

EDIT: Ahh it's probably that the site uses `prefers-color-scheme` media queries, but missed a couple cases.