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Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

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Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#51

Post by cbaines »

rudolph9 wrote: post #15

Does anyone know of a recent comparison of NixOS vs Guix? Both these projects are awesome and I’m a NixOS user but I want to learn more about Guix. I’ve found older ones but nothing in the past year and with all the recent developments in both communities I’d love to see a side by side comparison.

Maybe it would be nice to have a wiki style page for this... anyway, I can only offer a perspective from the Guix side of things, but these are the reasons I'd personally be cautious about using Nix/Nixpkgs.

I believe a higher proportion of Nixpkgs don't build all or some of the software/artifacts from source. I picked a random example, JOSM. The nixpkgs package definition is quite short [1], but I don't think it's actually building the software? The Guix package definition is much longer [2] but I think that's because it's actually building the software from source.

1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio... 2: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

Personally, I like binary packages, which is why I use Guix, but I also value the security and flexibility of having these packages actually build the software from source.

Nixpkgs also contains non-free software. This is sort of related to the previous point, as it's much harder to tell if software is free or not if you're not building it from source, but Guix everything should be free software which takes away a worry when using it. With nixpkgs, I believe there are some bits of non-free software that are marked as such, but not taking a strong stance on attempting to build everything from source makes me generally unsure about the quality assurance in this area.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#52

Post by janneke »

mason55 wrote: post #17
LockAndLol wrote: post #3

I see that guix is a declarative package manager like nix. Where does it have a leg up over nix? And how's the GUI integration with KDE and gnome? Is there a backend for KDE Discover or the Gnome Software Center? Finally, I see that installation goes over a "curl | bash", which imo is a pretty insecure method of installation. I can understand why such an insecure method exists (so many different ways of installing so…

I am a basic Nix user so I can't speak to much, but my understanding is that one of the major difference is Guix uses Scheme (or a Scheme-like language) for config so it's more familiar. Nix uses their own language, also called Nix. On the other hand I believe the package repo for Nix is much more comprehensive and kept more up to date.

NixOS is an awesome system and Guix owes much to it and its creator, @edolstra.

Although GNU Guix is my personal preference, I believe that NixOS is an excellent choice and for the most part we have a shared vision.

If you are still using a legacy system, you'll want to try NixOS or GNU Guix!

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#53

Post by lukego »

gmanley wrote: post #40
benbristow wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gash is a slang term for the female sexual organ. Not a good name for a project.

If we were to reserve every word that is also used as slang for sexual organs we'd be out a lot of words. Peach, purse, shaft, sheath, tool, pocket, etc, these are all slang as well, yet we still use these for their original meaning. It's all about context. I'd also say 'gash' is quite regional. I've only ever heard it used in the U.K.

Australia too. Quite vulgar but not especially common nor especially rare.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#54

Post by [deleted] »

lukego wrote: post #53
gmanley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were to reserve every word that is also used as slang for sexual organs we'd be out a lot of words. Peach, purse, shaft, sheath, tool, pocket, etc, these are all slang as well, yet we still use these for their original meaning. It's all about context. I'd also say 'gash' is quite regional. I've only ever heard it used in the U.K.

Australia too. Quite vulgar but not especially common nor especially rare.

[deleted]

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#55

Post by rekado »

rudolph9 wrote: post #15

Does anyone know of a recent comparison of NixOS vs Guix? Both these projects are awesome and I’m a NixOS user but I want to learn more about Guix. I’ve found older ones but nothing in the past year and with all the recent developments in both communities I’d love to see a side by side comparison.

I generally don't like to talk about other projects negatively, because I don't think that Nix and Guix should compete. They are different takes on the same concept. But as I'm very familiar with Guix and have occasionally looked at how they deal with some of the packaging problems I worked on in Guix I can say that the Nix colleagues are often punting on problems instead of solving them. Let me give you a few examples.

In Nixpkgs there are quite a few generated packages, some of which cannot be built. I'm maintaining R packages (from CRAN and Bioconductor) in Guix and I see that the equivalent packages in Nixpkgs do not accommodate some of their quirks, so they cannot actually be built.

Another example where Nixpkgs does not build packages from source is TeX Live. The SVN repository of TeX Live contains countless generated files, and all of the TeX Live packages in Nixpkgs merely copy the generated files from SVN instead of building them from source.

Java packages in Nixpkgs often seem to include pre-built jars whereas in Guix we're going to great lengths to build everything from source. This comes at a cost, of course: Guix has fever Java packages because of that, but those that it has are actually built from source.

Of course, I'm biased towards Guix, but I must say that I'm very fond of the level of integration that Guix achieves. When I look at Nix I see a bunch of seemingly separately developed tools that are written in a mix of languages (with Shell code being rather common). In Guix all tools are written in Scheme, use the same API, behave similarly, etc. It just feels much more polished to me.

That said, there is no animosity between these communities, and I think we would all be better off avoiding the mental pitfall of competition; we work on the same problems with different values and thus our approach differs. This leads to diversity rather than duplication of work.

Here are some more things I wrote comparing Nix and Guix in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19807042

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#56

Post by tom_mellior »

sterlind wrote: post #45
kazinator wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed how it can be possible not understand that what came up in the author's mind is not the issue at all, and irrelevant. According to your reasoning, I can name an alarm program "cock", just as long as what was going through my mind at the time was a rooster crowing in the morning. ("Get woken up by cock!") What anyone else chooses to read into it is their problem?

Well, there is Coq, the interactive theorem prover. I quite like the name (and the logo, which is a rooster.)

Legend has it that Gérard Huet, who named Coq, enjoys double entendre and chose the name deliberately, just like he did with the Zipper data structure. So this might not be a great example of something that accidentally has a double meaning.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#57

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rekado wrote: post #55
rudolph9 wrote: post #15

Does anyone know of a recent comparison of NixOS vs Guix? Both these projects are awesome and I’m a NixOS user but I want to learn more about Guix. I’ve found older ones but nothing in the past year and with all the recent developments in both communities I’d love to see a side by side comparison.

I generally don't like to talk about other projects negatively, because I don't think that Nix and Guix should compete. They are different takes on the same concept. But as I'm very familiar with Guix and have occasionally looked at how they deal with some of the packaging problems I worked on in Guix I can say that the Nix colleagues are often punting on problems instead of solving them. Let me give you a few exampl…

> This comes at a cost, of course: Guix has fever Java packages because of that, but those that it has are actually built from source.

Truly this is much more valuable than actually being able to use the software.

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#58

Post by e12e »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #57
rekado wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally don't like to talk about other projects negatively, because I don't think that Nix and Guix should compete. They are different takes on the same concept. But as I'm very familiar with Guix and have occasionally looked at how they deal with some of the packaging problems I worked on in Guix I can say that the Nix colleagues are often punting on problems instead of solving them. Let me give you a few exampl…

> This comes at a cost, of course: Guix has fever Java packages because of that, but those that it has are actually built from source. Truly this is much more valuable than actually being able to use the software.

If you just wanted to download and run a binary (or jar) - you can still do that?

While freedom zero (the most important!) is the ability "to use the software" - being able to improve, patch and adapt the software is also very important!

Re: Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%

#59

Post by tadfisher »

davexunit wrote: post #48
jabirali wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3D graphics situation is not great thanks to NVIDIA and AMD. AMD is now one of the good guys when it comes to open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMDGPU Basically, since 2015, AMD has offered an official driver under an MIT license for Linux and *BSD. Personally, I'm definitely choosing AMD for my next laptop :).

Unless things have changed recently, AMD GPUs still require proprietary firmware and thus do not work on a fully free system. I bought an AMD GPU a few years ago to try it out and it didn't work.

As do Intel[1] and Nvidia[2].

[1]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...

[2]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...

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