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How easy (or even possible) is it to use proprietary libraries such as MKL or CUDA or GPU drivers with Guix/GuixSD?

• davexunit 9y ago
  It'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 ago
    But 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 ago
      We 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.