It's NixOS but more free and with scheme instead of nix
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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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..
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.
I love it! I went all in on it about a year ago and haven't looked back ever since
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.
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.
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.nix is 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 added flake.nix in 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 iwd is:
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 tried it out one single time and it failed to install or update or something. Had to then find all the places it had inserted itself into in my system. Later I found out it's based on some LISP variant. Even later I found out you can't install firefox with it because of gnu or something?
That all combined dissuaded me from touching it again.
nix has terrible documentation, but it's kinda worked for me, so I'm sticking with it.
Later I found out it’s based on some LISP variant.
Wait how did you find out it was written in Scheme after you installed it? Sounds like someone didn't do their research.
firefox
Mozilla is picky with where their trademark is being used, not a "GNU specific" problem, it had affected Debian for years before Mozilla backed off. Guix instead uses GNU Icecat which is a completely libre web browser that doesn't run proprietary JS by default. Of course you can still install Firefox since Guix community members have already packaged it in their own channels.
nix has terrible documentation
One thing that Guix excels at.
Wait how did you find out it was written in Scheme after you installed it? Sounds like someone didn’t do their research.
Yes, I read all specs before installing anything I ever use. Before using the internet I researched the entire IP stack, studied computer science, and am right now using smokes signals captured by a camera at exactly 1 FPS to encode my bits so that you can read them.
🙄
One thing that Guix excels at.
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Yes, I read all specs before installing anything I ever use.
It's literally in the front page of the project. https://guix.gnu.org/
Hackable. It provides Guile Scheme APIs, including high-level embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs) to define packages and whole-system configurations.
No idea how you survive Nix's scattered documentation.
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lmao.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.