alt Hacker NewsGuix System First Impressions as a Nix User
Comments
I've had a passing curiosity about Guix, so it was good to read this report.
One thing I didn't find is Guix on servers. I am all-in on NixOS for both my daily driver desktop and couple of servers, and adding more of either will be simple modifications to my flake repository. I really appreciate that simplicity and consistency. Does Guix offer that?
The other thing is package availability: it's amazing on Nix. Plus, they remain relatively fresh on the unstable channel. How's that on Guix?
My issue with Guix coming from NixOS is the missing first-class zfs support for root, crypto included, RustDesk, few other common services who are hard to package.
Guix potential target IMVHO should be desktop power users, not HPC, NixOS while mostly developed for embedded systems (Anduril) or servers in general still take care of desktops, Guix apparently not and that's a big issue... Nowadays outside academia I doubt there are many GNU/Linux users who deploy on plain ext4...
Modern GPU drivers are a nightmare for open source. Wifi no better but slightly less critical. Power management. Forget Linux this should be the year of the NetBSD desktop but we can’t have nice architectures bc of economics in computing. The whole scenario makes sense but the emergent result sucks.
TLDR: ... I'm getting a comparable experience to NixOS, with all the usual pros a declarative environment brings and without having to put up with Nixlang.
With respect, the author sounds too fickle for me to ascribe value to their "first impressions" of a distro.
> merely pulling in Nixpkgs is an effort, due to the repository being massive.
I've embraced daily shallow clone/fetches and the burden is now mostly just the 2GB of disk space.
It's a bit annoying though that git doesn't make it easier. No one would shallow clone later screw up and download every commit anyway, I feel shallow clone repos should be set up with a different configuration that fully-embraces shallow history (not that the configuration options even exist today AFAIK).