Big fan of Guix, though I've only tested it in VMs, via Vagrant[1], for lack of disposable hardware.<p>Its usability by non-specialists can be improved (and is, release by release) but the concept is very promising for reproducible systems.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/OverkillGuy/jibyconf/blob/master/GUIXSD_Vagrantfile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/OverkillGuy/jibyconf/blob/master/GUIXSD_V...</a>
I'm a NixOS user and seriously considering at least trying out GuixSD.<p>Does GuixSD come with Plasma desktop and other KDE assortments? My lazy google-fu is failing me, and the installer video does not list is as option.<p>I also have an Nvidia Optimus laptop so I assume I'll be using nonguix repo and building non free kernel, but that can be tolerated. If anyone uses nonguix kernel/nvidia, can you please tell me how long of build times I should be expecting? I have an i5 8th gen.
Guix is one of the most important software projects today. It can be bootstrapped from an auditable 357-byte binary seed [0]. No other package manager can claim that. It is also a unifying force for much of the GNU ecosystem.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.freelists.org/post/bootstrappable/wipfullsourcebootstrap-from-a-357byte-hex0-to-hello" rel="nofollow">https://www.freelists.org/post/bootstrappable/wipfullsourceb...</a>
I really would like to see a Gentoo equivalent based on Lisp/Scheme, but as far Guix seems to be not even near. I just looked for no-multilib option (only 64bit of libc), custom compile flags or similar, but didn't find anything.
Questions for the GuixSD and NixOS users:<p>1) Are these kind of systems overkill for the desktop user?<p>2) How easy is it to customize/tweak these systems in the manner that Gentoo does? So, building from source by tweaking the software options on build time?
Obligatory comparison to Nix [1]:<p>Pros:<p>* Better, more coherent and unified tooling<p>* Better docs<p>* Built with LISP (edit: Scheme), A standard language that is not project-specific. Nix lang is somewhat quirky and takes some getting used to. It's pretty decent though for a narrowly focused domain language.<p>Cons:<p>* Tiny community that is much smaller than Nix. nixpkgs is the largest package repository out there, providing most software that you could want.<p>* Really slow every time I tried it. Nix is written in C++ and actually performs quite well, even when building many hundreds of pacakges.<p>* Not systemd based. Say of systemd what you will, but there is a reason almost every distro has adopted it. It's just better. Also: most Linux users are familiar with systemd tooling by now, so that makes adoption even harder.<p>* Strong focus on freedom and not packaging proprietary software. Understandable, given the project origins. But awkward to the point of being mostly impractical for personal use - I can't package everything myself.<p>* No equivalent to home-manager [1], which is amazing for declarative user environments<p>[1] nixos.org/<p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager</a>
>Opportunistic use of neighboring substitute servers is entirely safe, thanks to reproducible builds.<p>How does this work? Just because the builds are reproducible doesn't mean that the artifacts published by substitute servers are actually the outputs of the build process you expect.
Just as a warning if you're considering Guix for server use: Switching generations (e.g., rolling back a system update) requires rebooting to take effect.