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> In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports ... unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, ... That sounds really cool. I wis
by alxmdev 10y ago
> In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports ... unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, ...
That sounds really cool. I wish I could install DEB packages just for my local user, without needing root access. I wanted this back at my university's computer lab, and I still want this on my own systems today.
These days a lot of people use personal single-user machines, so having it mandatory that packages be installed to the root file system is very restrictive. For example, I have a lot of DEB-packaged games from HumbleBundle, and it feels weird to need admin privileges to install them all across /usr/games, /usr/local/share and all that instead of just a place of my choosing under /home/me.
- agumonkey 10y agoCan't say for Guix, but nix can be installed standalone IIRC.
- rekado 10y agoYou can use Guix as a standalone package manager on pretty much any GNU+Linux distribution. It only affects /gnu, /var/guix, and /etc/guix/acl. It won't touch any global state (e.g. libraries in /usr, or binaries in /bin) and won't use any global state when building packages.
- viraptor 10y agoSo from a security standpoint, it's actually a good idea to do it like this. I mean, provided the games contact the internet in any way - for purely offline games it doesn't matter. By separating the owner and the account running the game, you can ensure that local write bugs cannot affect the executed code. Not a huge issue, but if you can prevent that at close to no cost, then why not? (ideally we should have simple user-accessible sandboxing instead, but that's not always easy at the moment)