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Disclaimer: I have been working on Guix since 2014 and use it in production. Guix and Nix are both implementations of the functional package management idea.
by rekado 9y ago
Disclaimer: I have been working on Guix since 2014 and use it in production.
Guix and Nix are both implementations of the functional package management idea. Nix has been around for quite a few more years than Guix.
In Guix package expressions are first-class and the DSL is embedded in Guile, a general purpose language, so packaging has a very different feel to it. It also allows for fun tools like "guix graph".
Guix is used in scientific environments (e.g. where I work); I don't know if there are deployments of Nix in HPC environments. I do think that there are more bioinformatics tools packaged for Guix.
Another difference is in how the two projects approach certain problems, such as bootstrapping from binaries. (Guix just got a new Java bootstrap from C.)
There is no rivalry between these projects and members of both projects cooperate in the reproducible builds efforts.
- brendyn 9y agoLudovic linked to this a couple weeks ago: https://ubc.uu.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/GNU-Guix-for-maintaining-a-HPC-software-stack-Roel-Janssen.pdf https://ubc.uu.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/GNU-Guix-for-ma...
- dragandj 9y agoHow easy (or even possible) is it to use proprietary libraries such as MKL or CUDA or GPU drivers with Guix/GuixSD?
- davexunit 9y agoIt's all possible to do, but the Guix developers do not provide assistance. From a purely technical perspective, software provided in binary form only impedes one of the main goals of Guix, 100% reproducible builds, because there is no source code.
- nagvx 9y agoBut would they provide resistance? As nice as the idea of a fully-free distro is, I have the impression that free distros have a minuscule userbase compared to their non-free counterparts. For an already niche distro, this sounds like a significant handicap. If someone came along and offered a hardware-compatibility repo or redistribution, would the Guix community work with them, or would the relationship be more distant, or even adversarial? I'm personally very interested in the project, and have no desire to poison the pure core of Guix, but I need my hardware to work.
- rekado 9y agoWe don't want to have discussions about non-free software on the project channels, because they really are off-topic. We won't do anything to sabotage third-party repositories (no matter what they might contain); in fact, we're working on implementing mechanisms to make it easier to load software from third-party channels. But as a project following the Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) we will not recommend third-party channels providing proprietory software, nor would we want our project's communication channels (mailing list, IRC, etc) to be used to steer users to channels that provide non-free software.