alt Hacker NewsTrying Guix: A Nixer's impressions
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I had a similar experience. After running `guix pull` a couple of times on an ancient laptop I shelved the project until I made a distcc cluster (I never did).
The main thing holding me back from trying guix is that, as far as I know, there is no support for macOS.
Very interesting writeup, as a long-time Nix user I've always been interested in trying guix but never gotten around to it. Great post overall.
> The thing is, I'm not actually sure if Guix's better documentation helps smooth the onboarding in any way because you have to already know Scheme, which is a more complex language than Nix.
LMAO absolutely not. Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. I picked up Scheme in about 1 day during a class in college. It's night-and-day different.
Guix SD will never catch on as long as they force non-systemd management. I don’t care to try Shepherd. Systemd is good enough and it has won.
> I had to use nonguix to get internet working on the machine, which had very immediate technical effects that bring me to
Stuff like this will
The main reasons I’m interested in guix:
- it uses a known-good language (lisp)
- IIRC it is more repeatable (the contents used in derivations play into the hash).
- It has a full source bootstrap
Maybe someone with a focus on improving UX needs to build one of these afresh.
> why flakes are nonsense
Oh wow, I want to hear more about that. I love flakes, but I've known they are controversial, and never really heard why.
I like them both, both interesting, quite similar, both with corner cases
Annoyingly both fail at basic stuff like falling back the graphics card, something Debian had solved 10 years ago, no configs needed, no matter Intel/NVIDIA/AMD. Even without the correct driver or firmware falling back to VESA or fbdev should be a given. Never had so many black screens as now. Even Windows has done better job at giving you a basic resolution while you install the drivers
Or maybe it's just the state of the Linux ecosystem, with the introduction of Wayland and NVIDIA open drivers, causing regressions
Also the unintuitive inverse of traditional package management, where if you want to update one package, all the system updates by default
Which increases the amount of bugs, having frequent updates to a stable system
To make it better you can add 2 channels, and call them nixos-stable v24 nixos-latest v25, keeping most of the system one version down increases stability a lot
Of course the incorporated Grub boot build choices is great to revert back to a working system
I really like the the separation Guix makes on having close source being a concern of a separate project
But both of them are equally easy to install open source only or include proprietary
Its nice read. We need more of comparative posts by user familiar with both nix and guix.
We see bias with most discussions.
Only cons with Guix I see is, lack of infrastructure and less volunteers to work on guix eco-system. If its solved, I can imagine guix can improve exponentially.