4 ms·

NixOS (the inspiration for Guix) has supported something like this for a while: http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#ch-containers http://nixos.org/nixos/ma

NixOS (the inspiration for Guix) has supported something like this for a while: http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#ch-containers http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#ch-containers There's even support coming in Nix for building standard layered Docker containers in a fully deterministic way: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/11156 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/11156 The deterministic properties of Guix and NixOS allow some amazing things. I personally prefer Nix as it has a more complete and mature ecosystem, but everyone should check out both projects though.

pmoriarty 11y ago
The main advantage of Guix over Nix seems to be that the former uses Scheme, while the latter uses a language of its own. As a lover of Scheme, that's a big win for me. I really don't want to have to learn a special-purpose language just for package management.
- trishume 11y ago
  I'm definitely a lisp fan, but the Nix language isn't as bad as I used to think. The laziness allows for some really cool and clean patterns that work intuitively and simply while still enabling powerful features. Also the syntax is tuned for clean hierarchical config files. And in some cases being pure helps you not shoot yourself in the foot with determinism. I still would probably prefer Guile, but Nix is nice enough. Mainly I just like the much larger ecosystem Nix/NixOS has. I can forsee myself being productive with NixOS as a desktop OS, not so much for GuixSD. I think of it this way: one new somewhat-fancy config language to learn is much better than the 100 simple config languages you learn to tweak Arch Linux.
civodul 11y ago
Note that Guix also supports lightweight development environments in containers, via user name spaces: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-environment.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... . This is in addition to whole-system containers: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-system.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .

pmoriarty 11y ago

The main advantage of Guix over Nix seems to be that the former uses Scheme, while the latter uses a language of its own. As a lover of Scheme, that's a big win for me. I really don't want to have to learn a special-purpose language just for package management.

trishume 11y ago
I'm definitely a lisp fan, but the Nix language isn't as bad as I used to think. The laziness allows for some really cool and clean patterns that work intuitively and simply while still enabling powerful features. Also the syntax is tuned for clean hierarchical config files. And in some cases being pure helps you not shoot yourself in the foot with determinism. I still would probably prefer Guile, but Nix is nice enough. Mainly I just like the much larger ecosystem Nix/NixOS has. I can forsee myself being productive with NixOS as a desktop OS, not so much for GuixSD. I think of it this way: one new somewhat-fancy config language to learn is much better than the 100 simple config languages you learn to tweak Arch Linux.

civodul 11y ago

Note that Guix also supports lightweight development environments in containers, via user name spaces: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-environment.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... . This is in addition to whole-system containers: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-system.html http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-g... .