6 ms·

GNU Guix System

68 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

orangebeet 4y ago
I was pretty excited about Guix because I find Guile more fun and less academic than Haskell (which Nix uses). Then I stumbled upon some of the extremist propaganda by one of the main Guile developers and promptly decided that it isn't for me.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Do you mean extremist in some general sense or just the usual hardline FSF free software stance?
  - orangetuba 4y ago
    I have nothing against the hardline stance the FSF holds, but I cannot support someone who joins an organization and then starts a crusade against its founder over his personal political views. I don't think politics belongs in open source software.
    - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
      > I don't think politics belongs in open source software. Politics will always be there, even if they aren't talked about.
- NoThisIsMe 4y ago
  Could you elaborate please?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  FUD much? really, show links or go away Please!
  - orangebeet 4y ago
    You can read about it on his blood red marxist blog, twitter etc: https://wingolog.org/archives/2021/03/25/here-we-go-again https://wingolog.org/archives/2021/03/25/here-we-go-again http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-... https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/1215946242225790983 https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/1215946242225790983
    - 3836293648 4y ago
      Rightfully criticising RMS for his objectively horrible behaviour is extremist propaganda now?
      - orangetuba 4y ago
        Objective according to you? https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      honestly, thank you for the links. I believe that evidence-based discussion on social topics is useful, and you have contributed to that. regarding "bloody marxist" or whatever.. I like the a-political, personal emphasis of GNU .. that means, I can sit next to a Real Bloody Marxist, and drink coffee and debug $lspci output.. seriously, I am OK with that, it supports a worldview of 'tolerance'.. similarly for people with serious depression, people who have had trouble with food addictions, people who SMOKE TOBACCO ! all of that.. its part of a "plural society" which I personally support everyday. back to lspci output here
      - cowtools 4y ago
        Even as a moderate-libertarian myself, it is not really surprising that a lot of free-software users and contributors are communists. RMS himself seems to be pretty left-leaning. It is encouraging that most free-software users/contributors can see past political squabbles and work on tech that improves society more objectively.
- rottingchris 4y ago
  Nix doesn't use Haskell. Nix uses its own language (the Nix expression language): https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Expression_Language https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Expression_Language
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    I can't figure out from Wikipedia if NixOS is a systemd user or, like Guix, has a custom services facility.
    - opan 4y ago
      NixOS uses systemd.
    - jbboehr 4y ago
      NixOS uses systemd, although wrapped in their own DSL, example: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/24903b5de2e07cc7b65eae8c850d6204981953de/nixos/modules/services/databases/cockroachdb.nix#L197-L222 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/24903b5de2e07cc7b65eae...
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      It currently uses systemd quite heavily. There at least was some conversation about making it more service manager agnostic so that others could be used, but I'm not aware of that having gotten anywhere. I haven't checked in a while though.
- branon 4y ago
  I'm interested in an academic sense, what's the accusation here? Regardless of the person's views though I think if their code is clean and they're not actively applying said views to harm other contributors, live and let live...
  - orangetuba 4y ago
    Agreed. Actively trying to harm other contributors (Richard Stallman) is the problem here.
    - acdw 4y ago
      genuinely curious here: when was the last time rms contributed anything other than bad takes or toxic behavior to the fsf?
      - orangetuba 4y ago
        I don't have a clear overview of the exact timeline, but at some point he created the FSF, the original GCC, Emacs, GDB, GNU Make, parts of the GNU userspace tools, the predecessor to Wikipedia, the copyleft concept and the GPL license among other things. How does it compare to your contributions?
        kaba0 4y ago
        Emacs was not originally created by him though, but Guy Steele and David Moon.
        maleldil 4y ago
        RMS can be an amazing engineer that helped shape the tech world as we know it today, and still be a horrible human being.
        mongol 4y ago
        I am quite sure he is not a horrible human being. I reserve that word for people like Putin.
cowtools 4y ago
I am somewhat hopeful for what Guix might mean for their "Shepard" init system and (specifically GPL) microkernels like HURD. The guile package management system isn't to interesting in my opinion: we already have distros like Gentoo, Nix, Arch, Alpine, etc. that support both build scripts (usually as some specialized shell script) and binary packages. If anything, I think as programmers we tend to lean towards application-specific languages where we ought to favor generic languages for the sake of simplicity. Because it's under the GNU name and seems somewhat kernel-agnostic, I think this might lead to the case where we can finally point towards a operating system and say "that's GNU".
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "The guile package management system isn't to interesting in my opinion: we already have distros like Gentoo, Nix, Arch, Alpine, etc. that support both build scripts (usually as some specialized shell script) and binary packages." The big win you get with Guix over the package managers in the other systems you reference (except for Nix) is deterministic, bit-identical, reproducible builds.[1] "as programmers we tend to lean towards application-specific languages where we ought to favor generic languages for the sake of simplicity" Guix does use a general purpose programming language: Guile Scheme. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
  - cowtools 4y ago
    If I have to learn a programming language just so I can use a single thing, then it might as well be an application-specific language. That being said, I will look into guile anyways. I have a little project I'm working on that could benefit from a lisp-like configuration file, and I've currently implemented a crappy s-expression interpreter already.
    - rscho 4y ago
      Guile scheme is made to be easily embeddable. You should definitely try it. If you want to go the minimalist way, there is also S7, which is very good.
dudeinsf 4y ago
Spent a year with Guix and writing my own configuration. Definitely much easier to reason about using Lisp syntax over Googling what random function of the DSL you need in Nix, but I ultimately switched to Nix because of it's community and Darwin support. Nix has a large group of folks who just want a sane, declarative way to manage their environments, and to get back to what they were doing. I want to spend the least amount of time managing my tools and when running into problems with Guix, digging for answers or jumping into the REPL just took too long. Lots of devs in the Guix community seem motivated to build and contribute back, which is great if you're looking to spend your time doing that. I now use Nix to share configuration between my Macbook Pro, NixOS Desktop, VMs in my home lab, etc. Both Guix and Nix are amazing once you've developed your configuration, I'll never go back. I do a simple "./bin/nixos-update" and "./bin/macos-update" and Nix takes care of the rest. Occasionally I'll pull something upstream that borks my machine; rolling back is so trivial, I'll just check nixpkgs for Issues to see what's going on, where usually I'll find a 1-liner to fix it or I'll wait for the next release. Links to my configs https://github.com/dustinlyons/guix-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/guix-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  How does the Nix configuration language compare to Guile?
  - dudeinsf 4y ago
    So I had to write a few functions in both. With Guile, very straight forward using Lisp's powerful "data-as-code, code-as-data" paradigms (the ` operator). A joy really, and writing code just felt like writing Lisp, where one gets to reason about small scope within simple functions. With Nix, I had to learn how the whole thing works before I could even get started. Nix is not a "normal" language, you're essentially just writing chunks of configuration, organized across different files, building up to one big derivation (as Nix calls it) that gets interpreted. Nix has syntax on how it expects the configuration to look and what configuration it expects to be defined. You can learn the syntax but it's still confusing (to me) as to what configuration is always expected. And errors can still be cryptic.
smartineng 4y ago
Is there some equivalent bootstrappability effort like in Guix system ported to Nix? https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-ARM_RISC-V/ https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-ARM_RISC-V/
minimilian 4y ago
When I tried this about a year ago, it wasn't possible to set up full-disk encryption with hibernation.
- wdkrnls 4y ago
  It also seems to be impossible to use a keyfile for unlocking additional disks.
opan 4y ago
I've primarily used Guix System on my main PC for a few years now. It's a lot of fun. The biggest negatives are packages being out of date or missing, updates failing due to a broken package, updates taking over 24 hours because you had bad timing and the build server hasn't built all the web browsers yet, and the configuration and packaging can seem complicated to a non-programmer. Oh, and qutebrowser is very broken and no one talks about it for some reason. I suspect at times that I'm its only user on Guix System... I love having a list of packages easily edited with a text editor and then applied. Rollbacks are easy and useful. Partial upgrades help work around a few misbehaving packages stopping updates (whether broken or just long builds, you can skip them in the moment and then try updating them again later). Most issues would be solved by having more contributors, which will probably come with time. Although you still need people who care about the same packages as you, or else your Guix Wishlist entries may sit around unpackaged for years, or your packaged things may stay on old versions. I know several NixOS users, but I have struggled to get new people to stick with Guix System for more than a few weeks. Things would also improve if I were to learn/contribute more myself, but I don't know that I have the spoons or the time. For now I'll just keep getting by with the little bit I know. Guix feels like the future, so I can't help but want to use it and support it, even when it's rough in some spots.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
I loved the idea of Guix and considered experimenting with it on my laptop, but unfortunately their insistence on free software purity makes it tough to adopt. The Linux Libre kernel is totally unsuitable for use on any modern equipment due to the unavoidable need for proprietary firmware, and in general any use of non-free software isn't just avoided in the community/ecosystem, it's something no one is even allowed to talk about. I can certainly admire and appreciate that level of idealism and adherence to principles, but unfortunately, at least IME, it limits where Guix could be adopted.
- acdw 4y ago
  I've hit this before on official channels, too (namely #guix). I did discover the forbidden knowledge of non-guix repo at one point, but I agree that it's silly to not even acknowledge its existence. just turns people off honestly. we're not all rms.
- opan 4y ago
  There is a #nonguix IRC channel on the same network (as well as a Guix Channel containing packages), and you have the option to install regular Linux instead of Linux-libre. I am lucky to not need to do any of this, but the option is there, and several people take advantage of it. They simply do not wish to discuss non-free software in the main official channel. If this is your only holdup, I hope you'll give it another try.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    The total lack of any reasonable support anywhere online outside of an IRC channel makes this a tough thing to justify. Guix is already a niche solution in a niche area of distributions and package management, and finding solutions to problems is hard enough. The fact that there's an actual social stigma to even mentioning the non-free repo dramatically reduces the chances you'll find any meaningful help online. Heck, I recall hitting Google and trying to search for "Guix stock kernel" and finding zero meaningful results beyond some hints of a non-free repo that no one could point to or talk about in any of the "official" project venues.

68 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

I was pretty excited about Guix because I find Guile more fun and less academic than Haskell (which Nix uses). Then I stumbled upon some of the extremist propaganda by one of the main Guile developers and promptly decided that it isn't for me.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
Do you mean extremist in some general sense or just the usual hardline FSF free software stance?
- orangetuba 4y ago
  I have nothing against the hardline stance the FSF holds, but I cannot support someone who joins an organization and then starts a crusade against its founder over his personal political views. I don't think politics belongs in open source software.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > I don't think politics belongs in open source software. Politics will always be there, even if they aren't talked about.
NoThisIsMe 4y ago
Could you elaborate please?
mistrial9 4y ago
FUD much? really, show links or go away Please!
- orangebeet 4y ago
  You can read about it on his blood red marxist blog, twitter etc: https://wingolog.org/archives/2021/03/25/here-we-go-again https://wingolog.org/archives/2021/03/25/here-we-go-again http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-... https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/1215946242225790983 https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/1215946242225790983
  - 3836293648 4y ago
    Rightfully criticising RMS for his objectively horrible behaviour is extremist propaganda now?
    - orangetuba 4y ago
      Objective according to you? https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ https://rms-support-letter.github.io/
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    honestly, thank you for the links. I believe that evidence-based discussion on social topics is useful, and you have contributed to that. regarding "bloody marxist" or whatever.. I like the a-political, personal emphasis of GNU .. that means, I can sit next to a Real Bloody Marxist, and drink coffee and debug $lspci output.. seriously, I am OK with that, it supports a worldview of 'tolerance'.. similarly for people with serious depression, people who have had trouble with food addictions, people who SMOKE TOBACCO ! all of that.. its part of a "plural society" which I personally support everyday. back to lspci output here
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Even as a moderate-libertarian myself, it is not really surprising that a lot of free-software users and contributors are communists. RMS himself seems to be pretty left-leaning. It is encouraging that most free-software users/contributors can see past political squabbles and work on tech that improves society more objectively.
rottingchris 4y ago
Nix doesn't use Haskell. Nix uses its own language (the Nix expression language): https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Expression_Language https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Expression_Language
- smitty1e 4y ago
  I can't figure out from Wikipedia if NixOS is a systemd user or, like Guix, has a custom services facility.
  - opan 4y ago
    NixOS uses systemd.
  - jbboehr 4y ago
    NixOS uses systemd, although wrapped in their own DSL, example: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/24903b5de2e07cc7b65eae8c850d6204981953de/nixos/modules/services/databases/cockroachdb.nix#L197-L222 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/24903b5de2e07cc7b65eae...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    It currently uses systemd quite heavily. There at least was some conversation about making it more service manager agnostic so that others could be used, but I'm not aware of that having gotten anywhere. I haven't checked in a while though.
branon 4y ago
I'm interested in an academic sense, what's the accusation here? Regardless of the person's views though I think if their code is clean and they're not actively applying said views to harm other contributors, live and let live...
- orangetuba 4y ago
  Agreed. Actively trying to harm other contributors (Richard Stallman) is the problem here.
  - acdw 4y ago
    genuinely curious here: when was the last time rms contributed anything other than bad takes or toxic behavior to the fsf?
    - orangetuba 4y ago
      I don't have a clear overview of the exact timeline, but at some point he created the FSF, the original GCC, Emacs, GDB, GNU Make, parts of the GNU userspace tools, the predecessor to Wikipedia, the copyleft concept and the GPL license among other things. How does it compare to your contributions?
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Emacs was not originally created by him though, but Guy Steele and David Moon.
      - maleldil 4y ago
        RMS can be an amazing engineer that helped shape the tech world as we know it today, and still be a horrible human being.
        mongol 4y ago
        I am quite sure he is not a horrible human being. I reserve that word for people like Putin.

cowtools 4y ago

I am somewhat hopeful for what Guix might mean for their "Shepard" init system and (specifically GPL) microkernels like HURD. The guile package management system isn't to interesting in my opinion: we already have distros like Gentoo, Nix, Arch, Alpine, etc. that support both build scripts (usually as some specialized shell script) and binary packages. If anything, I think as programmers we tend to lean towards application-specific languages where we ought to favor generic languages for the sake of simplicity. Because it's under the GNU name and seems somewhat kernel-agnostic, I think this might lead to the case where we can finally point towards a operating system and say "that's GNU".

pmoriarty 4y ago
"The guile package management system isn't to interesting in my opinion: we already have distros like Gentoo, Nix, Arch, Alpine, etc. that support both build scripts (usually as some specialized shell script) and binary packages." The big win you get with Guix over the package managers in the other systems you reference (except for Nix) is deterministic, bit-identical, reproducible builds.[1] "as programmers we tend to lean towards application-specific languages where we ought to favor generic languages for the sake of simplicity" Guix does use a general purpose programming language: Guile Scheme. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
- cowtools 4y ago
  If I have to learn a programming language just so I can use a single thing, then it might as well be an application-specific language. That being said, I will look into guile anyways. I have a little project I'm working on that could benefit from a lisp-like configuration file, and I've currently implemented a crappy s-expression interpreter already.
  - rscho 4y ago
    Guile scheme is made to be easily embeddable. You should definitely try it. If you want to go the minimalist way, there is also S7, which is very good.

dudeinsf 4y ago

Spent a year with Guix and writing my own configuration. Definitely much easier to reason about using Lisp syntax over Googling what random function of the DSL you need in Nix, but I ultimately switched to Nix because of it's community and Darwin support. Nix has a large group of folks who just want a sane, declarative way to manage their environments, and to get back to what they were doing. I want to spend the least amount of time managing my tools and when running into problems with Guix, digging for answers or jumping into the REPL just took too long. Lots of devs in the Guix community seem motivated to build and contribute back, which is great if you're looking to spend your time doing that. I now use Nix to share configuration between my Macbook Pro, NixOS Desktop, VMs in my home lab, etc. Both Guix and Nix are amazing once you've developed your configuration, I'll never go back. I do a simple "./bin/nixos-update" and "./bin/macos-update" and Nix takes care of the rest. Occasionally I'll pull something upstream that borks my machine; rolling back is so trivial, I'll just check nixpkgs for Issues to see what's going on, where usually I'll find a 1-liner to fix it or I'll wait for the next release. Links to my configs https://github.com/dustinlyons/guix-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/guix-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config

pmoriarty 4y ago
How does the Nix configuration language compare to Guile?
- dudeinsf 4y ago
  So I had to write a few functions in both. With Guile, very straight forward using Lisp's powerful "data-as-code, code-as-data" paradigms (the ` operator). A joy really, and writing code just felt like writing Lisp, where one gets to reason about small scope within simple functions. With Nix, I had to learn how the whole thing works before I could even get started. Nix is not a "normal" language, you're essentially just writing chunks of configuration, organized across different files, building up to one big derivation (as Nix calls it) that gets interpreted. Nix has syntax on how it expects the configuration to look and what configuration it expects to be defined. You can learn the syntax but it's still confusing (to me) as to what configuration is always expected. And errors can still be cryptic.

smartineng 4y ago

Is there some equivalent bootstrappability effort like in Guix system ported to Nix? https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-ARM_RISC-V/ https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-ARM_RISC-V/

minimilian 4y ago

When I tried this about a year ago, it wasn't possible to set up full-disk encryption with hibernation.

wdkrnls 4y ago
It also seems to be impossible to use a keyfile for unlocking additional disks.

opan 4y ago

I've primarily used Guix System on my main PC for a few years now. It's a lot of fun. The biggest negatives are packages being out of date or missing, updates failing due to a broken package, updates taking over 24 hours because you had bad timing and the build server hasn't built all the web browsers yet, and the configuration and packaging can seem complicated to a non-programmer. Oh, and qutebrowser is very broken and no one talks about it for some reason. I suspect at times that I'm its only user on Guix System... I love having a list of packages easily edited with a text editor and then applied. Rollbacks are easy and useful. Partial upgrades help work around a few misbehaving packages stopping updates (whether broken or just long builds, you can skip them in the moment and then try updating them again later). Most issues would be solved by having more contributors, which will probably come with time. Although you still need people who care about the same packages as you, or else your Guix Wishlist entries may sit around unpackaged for years, or your packaged things may stay on old versions. I know several NixOS users, but I have struggled to get new people to stick with Guix System for more than a few weeks. Things would also improve if I were to learn/contribute more myself, but I don't know that I have the spoons or the time. For now I'll just keep getting by with the little bit I know. Guix feels like the future, so I can't help but want to use it and support it, even when it's rough in some spots.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

I loved the idea of Guix and considered experimenting with it on my laptop, but unfortunately their insistence on free software purity makes it tough to adopt. The Linux Libre kernel is totally unsuitable for use on any modern equipment due to the unavoidable need for proprietary firmware, and in general any use of non-free software isn't just avoided in the community/ecosystem, it's something no one is even allowed to talk about. I can certainly admire and appreciate that level of idealism and adherence to principles, but unfortunately, at least IME, it limits where Guix could be adopted.

acdw 4y ago
I've hit this before on official channels, too (namely #guix). I did discover the forbidden knowledge of non-guix repo at one point, but I agree that it's silly to not even acknowledge its existence. just turns people off honestly. we're not all rms.
opan 4y ago
There is a #nonguix IRC channel on the same network (as well as a Guix Channel containing packages), and you have the option to install regular Linux instead of Linux-libre. I am lucky to not need to do any of this, but the option is there, and several people take advantage of it. They simply do not wish to discuss non-free software in the main official channel. If this is your only holdup, I hope you'll give it another try.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  The total lack of any reasonable support anywhere online outside of an IRC channel makes this a tough thing to justify. Guix is already a niche solution in a niche area of distributions and package management, and finding solutions to problems is hard enough. The fact that there's an actual social stigma to even mentioning the non-free repo dramatically reduces the chances you'll find any meaningful help online. Heck, I recall hitting Google and trying to search for "Guix stock kernel" and finding zero meaningful results beyond some hints of a non-free repo that no one could point to or talk about in any of the "official" project venues.