Reposting because it looks like federation failed.
I was just reading about it, it sounds like a pretty cool OS and package manager. Has anyone actually used it?
The idea behind it really appeals to me. However, Guix is so niche that I felt like it was not worth the effort to actually daily drive it. I went the NixOS way instead and have been daily driving it now for almost 2years. I’m really satisfied with the paradigm immutable and reproducible os. I also manage my servers this way and it makes it really easy to rollback stuff.
The learning curve is the same as for any language but you have to relearn how to manage an os this way as it can be really different than a trad os. It forces you to really understand for example how packages traditionally expect to link to various libs available on your system.
So I think Guix (and Nix) is the most technologically advanced package manager in existence, and I hope someday all package managers work like Guix.
One other very interesting feature about Guix
(which I don’t think Nix is doing yet)(which Nix also does) is that they have implemented a fully verifiable bootstrap, meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough for a group of humans to check for correctness and safety. Also, every step of the build process exists in the package repository, with no reliance on externally built binaries for anything, not even the C compiler toolchain. They accomplish this with a multi-phase bootstrap process, where a smaller, simpler C compiler is used to build GCC.Do I use Guix? Well, no. Simply put, it is not quite to the point where it just works on a lot of the computer hardware that I own. With a bit more work, with a few more developers, and a bit more money invested, Guix could pretty soon become as reliable and useful as Debian or Fedora. But it is not quite there yet. And frankly, I have other more important things to do than worry about debugging problems with the operating system I am using.
meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough to check for correctness and safety.
Full-source bootstrap isn’t about just the kernel, it affects every piece of software. With GUIX and Nix, every single package can be fully traced back to the bootstrap seed.
Though it should be noted that you do require a running Linux kernel on an x86 machine in order to bootstrap.
it is not quite to the point where it /just works/ on a lot of the computer hardware that I own.
Unless we get some serious money, effort and/or regulation w.r.t. OSS firmware, that will likely never be the case.
That has nothing to do with its technology though, that’s a political issue. GUIX is a GNU project and acts like proprietary software does not exist/is not a basic necessity in 2023.GUIX is a GNU project and acts like proprietary software does not exist/is not a basic necessity in 2023.
Gross oversimplification, Guix absolutely knows that proprietary software exists, but also Guix is a project that values transparent build process (unlike Nix, which allows binaries and nonfree packages).
If you don’t have the requisite bare metal to run Guix by itself, you can run it as a foreign package manager (on top of your existing distribution), in a virtual machine, or alongside package channels outside of guix that package nonfree software.
The linux-libre kernel is only an issue for Guix System (the analogue to NixOS for Nix) and for users who need that specific hardware to be used. Guix is a breath of fresh air in package managers who attempt to sweep nonfree software under the rug and try to make the issue invisible.
If you don’t have the requisite bare metal to run Guix by itself
That’s a bit disingenuous wording as modern hardware that can run without proprietary firmware is an absolute rarity at this point.
The vast majority of people on earth do not have access to such hardware.
The linux-libre kernel is only an issue for Guix System (the analogue to NixOS for Nix)
Point taken. I was talking about the OS aspect of both though, given that @Ramin_HAL9001@lemmy.ml compared it to Debian and Fedora.
The project should have really kept the GuixSD name. Much clearer separation and also sounds a lot better.
package managers who attempt to sweep nonfree software under the rug and try to make the issue invisible.
Which ones?
In Nix, you get a giant red error when you try to eval unfree software and need to explicitly opt-in.
That’s a bit disingenuous wording as modern hardware that can run without proprietary firmware is an absolute rarity at this point.
But it’s not impossible, nor is it something that can’t be solved in the future with CPU architectures like RISC-V.
The project should have really kept the GuixSD name. Much clearer separation and also sounds a lot better.
Agreed.
package managers who attempt to sweep nonfree software under the rug and try to make the issue invisible.
I should have been more clear, excluding nonfree blobs were widely decided to be a lost cause across the distribution space. The final being Debian very recently. Tbh I do sometimes wish that Guix took the Nix approach with
hardware-configuration.nix, but the fact remains is that the Guix maintainers do not wish to maintain nonfree packages and I respect that decision as Guix doesn’t go out of its way to prevent others from installing the nonfree blobs/packages themselves.
Nix is also working on reproducible builds. In fact, the minimal installation CD for NixOS last release was reproducible. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-reproducible-builds-minimal-installation-iso-successfully-independently-rebuilt/34756/
Another interesting thing about Guix is that it compiles everything itself (with an option to outsource the heavy lifting in case you’re on a Raspberry Pi or something). Layers of abstraction not talking to each other properly is a conceptual pet peeve of mine, so I like the idea of everything being visible to the compiler like that.
As far as I understand it, Guix will download pre-built binaries for most packages from a cache by default, and the Guix OS distribution makes sure the x86_64 binaries for the latest package descriptions are always cached, so you should usually not have to locally build packages.
But of course you can easily tweak the default configuration of packages you install and trigger a local re-build of those packages, since changing the configuration of any package causes a cache miss.
Everyone thinks it’s great, but they actually run NixOS in the meanwhile
It’s NixOS but more free and with scheme instead of nix
Guix is almost like nix but with scheme, right? Any other differences?
I do like scheme. Nix is quite impressive. But my unpopular opinion is I am not convinced it’s philosophy is necessary. Nix feels like a workaround to legacy baggage in POSIX to allow for all its features of full reproducibility of packages and the overall system. Although Gentoo is not exactly reproducible, I feel like the level of control is sufficient to give me the benefits I want.
Nix works for maybe 95% of cases, but the 5% where its workarounds do not work sre annoying to deal with. Gentoo on the other hand doesn’t break so much from the traditional unix way of doing things, but still grants the user a great load of freedom and choice.
Based on what I’ve heard so far: GNU Shepard instead of systemd, a package manager that compiles things from source and allows user-defined compiler options, a totally different way of arranging system files, and Guile-Scheme is used for everything; it sounds like there’s no other kind of configuration anywhere.
It also uses Linux-libre by default, although you can go back to plain Linux, and they’re working on Hurd.
The biggest difference between Nix and Guix is that Guix doesn’t support non-foss software, meaning you can’t use it as a package manager on other operating systems. I originally wanted to use Guix but use a Mac for work, so that became a deal breaker.
Nix is pretty awesome as a package manager, I’ve been happy with it after the truly unnecessary learning curve brutality. I do not imagine I would ever use the full OS though.
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This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to “critical mass” as we’ve got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I’d probably enjoy Guix more.
It’s a bit of a nitpick, but I’d argue there’s more than one critical mass, and NixOS is already there for the purposes of tinkerers and some early adopters. General Linux people are next, and it’s probably not quite there, which is I think what you’re getting at.
Since it’s the frontrunner as you point out, I have high hopes it will make it.
I’ve found that the unstable branch of nixos has almost all the packages that I want / need at the bleeding edge. For more obscure packages I build from source.
Interested to hear what packages you were chasing that are outdated / not present.
Keeping a community going is a beast all on it’s own, which is probably what’s missing. Lemmy was pretty dead before Reddit refugees arrived too, or so I hear.
Using Scheme instead of a purely functional language like Nix as the Nix/Guix expression language is a bold choice I am not sure I agree with.
Using Scheme instead of a purely functional language like Nix as the Nix/Guix expression language is a bold choice I am not sure I agree with.
Scheme is the most functional of all non-purely-functional languages that I know of. What’s more, the parts of Guix in which packages are defined are quite pure, even using monads for some things, so it is really not too different from the Nix language.
So I guess they just wanted to use an established language?
Guile Scheme is the official extensions language for the GNU Project. Guile and Guix’s history often intersect as Guix is seen as the shining poster child of Guile and contributes to a lot of Guile’s development.
When you say “Scheme” you should also refer to what type of Scheme you’re referring to as there are multiple with different feature sets/goals.
TIL.
the parts of Guix in which packages are defined are quite pure, even using monads for some things
Monads have nothing to do with purity. In fact, one of the most infamous usages of them is Haskell’s IO monad which is probably the most impure construct in the entire language.
it is really not too different from the Nix language.
Hm, I can’t help but think that a lisp dialect can never really be similar to any language except another lisp.
No, monadic interface is used to programmatically access the store instead of being used to define packages. Packages are pure in Guix.
Guix uses Guile everywhere. Nix uses string interpolated Bash and Perl for anything impure.
Now what do you think?
It’s actually easier this way because you keep everything in one place.
I edited some file on Ubuntu to merge my audio channels into one because one of my speakers broke. Do you think I know what change I made to what file now? When I update, do you think I can merge my changes with the new file and make everything work? Of course not, I am several years into forgetting what I did
But
configuration.nixis one file, I usually get a deprecation notice for some stuff and just change a line here and there from time to time. All of my changes are in there and they are in git. When I switched to flakes I also addedflake.nixin there, but it’s still just two files in one folder I play around with. Not only that, but the maintainers already gave me the options I need for my services. I don’t have to follow some guide online to set something up, I just enable it and it works immediately.For example, enabling
iwdis:networking.wireless.iwd.enable = true;I just did that and it worked. I commented it out and it went back to whatever the default package is. Is this as easy to toggle back and forth in other distros?
I haven’t gnused it, I probably won’t unless I stop using nixos. I haven’t looked into it much, how different from nixos is guix?
Guix System is the NixOS equivalent. It is a GNU FSDG compliant, rolling release, non-systemd GNU/Linux operating system.
Guix System also has a much smaller community compared to NixOS (also more than a decade younger), but it is a community of passionate hackers who work to improve the distribution one way or the other. The big difference of course being that it is all written in Guile Scheme rather than a Domain Specific Language. So you’ll learn about things like g-expressions (Guix’s take on LISP’s s-expressions), Guix services (system and home), and Guile Scheme itself.
If you want to work with Guix, you basically have to become a contributor to the project, but it’s really a rewarding experience if you choose to do so.
Moderately. Same rough idea, with a few other things in the blend. For example, I found it via GNU Shepard, which it uses, while Nix sounds like it just uses systemd. The Guix package manager will also compile things from source with custom options if it needs.
Fyi, it’s now available on nixos.
I think that it’s a great project, and I hope it succeeds. My sense is that there is more momentum around Nix, so for a lot of uses it just makes more sense.
Guix and Nix both have the same issue imo, which is using a loosely typed language with an odd syntax. I feel like something both strongly typed and with a more common syntax would be easier to edit and faster to evaluate.
So, I actually learned about Guix via GNU Shepherd. It sounds like NixOS just uses systemd, which I don’t love. Not in a dramatic way, and I’m currently running systemd, but it does break the Unix philosophy.
A Haskell-based package manager would be pretty dope (seeing as that’s the gold standard for that sort of language). I wonder if someone’s working on it.
Shepard? Do you mean Shepherd?
Why yes, future person, I’ll fix the spelling.
I didn’t get an underline because it was capitalised, apparently.
It’s like Nix but has some extra features and uses Scheme instead of a custom language.
That’s barely an opinion, haha! That’s pretty much just what it is.
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Nobody has mentioned that Guix is readily available on NixOS right now? Add a line to your config and it’s ready to go. Compatible with everything else.
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You can use Nix on Guix System and vice versa, but it’s like installing them as a package manager on a foreign system. The store and packages currently are completely isolated between the two, although there’s a very early plan for a common store interface.
I tried and failed to install it on my laptop last year. Couldn’t figure out the problem and went back to pop. I’m messing around with it in a vm, though, and liking it a lot. I may try again when I have some more time to troubleshoot.
OP didn’t clarify whether they were talking about Guix System or Guix the package manager, but a great use case for Guix (and for Nix as well) is it can be installed on top of a stable distro (or a distro that provides binary blobs) like Debian or POP!_OS to get the latest versions of desired packages.
Just wanted to mention that.
OP didn’t clarify whether they were talking about Guix System or Guix the package manager
That was actually deliberate. I pretty much figured it’s niche enough to discuss them all together without confusion.
It looks like a cool distro if you want/need a highly configurable package manager that makes your system easily reproducible.
But if you’re just looking to learn more about Linux and learn more about how your system is set up then your average distro you might just want to go with Arch, Void, or Gentoo.
I absolutely love it, and I’m never going back to an ordinary distribution again. I do fine regarding software. I use standard channels, non-free channel, flatpaks and a few appimages. I can’t think of anything i’m missing atmo…
