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.<p>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.
I don't know that much about Guix, other than "super-free Nix with scheme" (and the article wasn't particularly illuminating other than boiling down to "Guix isn't really ready for most users right now"), but it's neat that there's momentum in the declarative OS-space. I hope that both Guix and NixOS keep growing and that more people start switching.<p>After switching to NixOS, I'd find it very frustrating to go back to an OS with imperative-style package/service management. It's clearly the better way.<p>A frustrating thing about NixOS--coming from Arch Linux and being used to the AUR--is that adding packages/updating packages can be a <i>bit</i> slow due to the sheer volume of PRs/Issues on the nixpkgs repo. There's always the NUR[1] but it hasn't picked up that much momentum yet (probably because it's kind of hard to search the darn thing). Eitherway, the packages are just Nix expressions and repos are just collections of these expressions, so nothing's preventing a real AUR alternative other than momentum.<p>It's interesting that Guix uses scheme instead of a home-baked configuration language like NixOS. While I don't find Nix particularly offensive, I don't find it particularly great either. And maybe this is naivity/Nix-inexperience on my part speaking, but I really wish that Nix had a proper type system and was strictly typed.<p>I guess my pipe dream is "HaskellOS" that's basically NixOS configured with Haskell (just think of xmonad-style configuration for your whole OS). That'd be really nice. And my secondary-pipe dream is a baked in, extremely-comprehensive home-manager[2] so we can bid dotfiles goodbye once and for all and have your entire system-state defined in a single file.<p>Maybe one day :)<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/nix-community/NUR" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nix-community/NUR</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/rycee/home-manager" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rycee/home-manager</a>
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.<p>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.<p>So back to Gentoo's package manager I went.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
I would recommend the author to try NixOS instead. It is not like that you wouldn't have issues however mostly things works (never had the kind of issue the author reported in this post, for example).<p>I think the difference between NixOS and Guix, excluding the language of choice of course, is that NixOS has the community to make it work. For example, I had a issue last night that I opened a issue in GitHub, and in a few hours the maintainer of the problematic package answered me and the problem was fixed.
> For a new package to be accepted into the [Debian] stable branch, it has to pass a number of days without any bug reports.<p>Um, that's not even remotely close to what the actual stable inclusion rules look like.
i feel very alienated by the guix developers due to the way they are betraying the gnu leadership.<p>This is sad because it is such a nice and important project. But I cannot easily separate the work from the people who did it.
Thank you for shedding light on a distro I didn't know existed!<p>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.
<i>”Just run guix package --roll-pack to “undo” an installation.”</i><p>I don’t know guix, but that looks like a typo to me. Shouldn’t that be <i>back</i>, not <i>pack</i>?
I love the style of packets organization that they describe. I think it has a name, I have seen it promoted as an alaternative to the typical mess that is "install everything in various parts of /usr/ and /opt/, put things in /etc/ or ~, silently overwrite old versions"