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I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their u

I like the blog post and I'm happy for the author, truly. But Guix doesn't sit well with me, and I rarely see this discussed: The Guix zealotry will be their undoing, and frankly this is where Nix shines. I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. The community tries very hard to help. With Guix, sure, there's stuff like nonguix, but take a gander at this from the nonguix readme: > Please do NOT promote this repository on any official Guix communication channels, such as their mailing lists or IRC channel, even in response to support requests! This is to show respect for the Guix project’s strict policy against recommending nonfree software, and to avoid any unnecessary hostility. Guix has truly noble goals (in classic GNU fashion) but they're ultimately misguided. Yes sure it's great that it's pure and reproducible and whatever else but if I can't get stuff done with it it's useless. Actually useless. The standard encouraged response to "Hi I'm a new Guix user and I was wondering how I can run steam?" is roughly equivalent to "Go fuck yourself" and I'm just amazed by that. If Guix ever becomes mainstream, it will be in spite of their efforts. In the meantime, I'm betting on Nix.

caslon 4y ago
Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog?" Especially not after saying their project was pointless since you couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat.
- ivalm 4y ago
  > but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog > couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat This seems like an unnecessarily hostile response, kind of inline with what the OP mentioned.
  - caslon 4y ago
    It's not particularly hostile. It's using an example to demonstrate that someone who sees an action as unethical won't be super hyped about you asking them to spend their time assisting you in doing something they find to be unethical, especially after you insult them for thinking it's unethical.
- xhevahir 4y ago
  To continue with your analogy: this sounds more like instructing other vegetarians to refuse to help any meat eaters who would like to alter a vegetarian recipe.
  - caslon 4y ago
    It's more like saying "Not in my house, thanks." Which is totally sensible!
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  Who is it for then? Everyone on the planet I have ever interacted with uses proprietary software daily. What are these mythical workflows? Am I only supposed to use Guix when it's convenient for their philosophy? nonguix is proof that adding proprietary software doesn't break diddly squat. It's all just gatekeeping. They could still achieve all their goals without being zealous, whether you believe me or not.
  - rekado 4y ago
    I really can't understand your attitude here. Guix makes it trivial to add other channels, such as nonguix, providing first-class packages. You can easily add proprietary software to Guix. It's just not part of Guix, because that's not the point of the project. Your "non-mythical" workflows that depend on proprietary workflows are not in any way impeded. You are projecting zealotry and gatekeeping (both terms with strong negative connotation) onto the project. And I must say that your attitude does nothing to advance your point, however deeply buried in hostile rhetoric it may be. As to mythical workflows without proprietary software: I'm not using proprietary software. Not on my laptops, my home network, my servers at work. Not because I'm some sort of "zealot", but because I simply have no need for it. It's really quite odd to observe how worked up you get in response to seeing a community that is content with not using proprietary software.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      My point is that Guix, the software, the documentation and the community are not user friendly. I'm happy that you have no need for proprietary software, that sounds nice. I do have such a need. It took me a stunning amount of time to find nonguix and figure it out. The community was not helpful. Figuring out how to use proprietary software with Guix is a miserable experience. As a new, curious user, I was told: I won't receive help, I can't discuss it, I shouldn't use proprietary software, that Guix isn't for me. This is not a welcoming response. It's not useful. It's hostile. It's zealotry. Instead, a welcoming response would be to say yeah, that's unfortunate but understandable, maybe help educate why free software is important, and suggest a path forward, such as pointing the user to unofficial channels. By comparison, Nix excels here -- There is no hostility. It's like being told by a mathematician that I shouldn't use math to calculate my taxes because taxes are unethical and illegal. Yeah that's nice, but I still have to pay them. I just want to calculate my taxes.
hosh 4y ago
Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism have their own issues). It’s not that I am a purist. Nix is still more practical. I have also heard that Nix and Guix can run on the same machine. However, I think Guix and Free Software conserve principles that I think are important for our society and civilization.
- k__ 4y ago
  I personally didn't use Guix or interacted with its community in any way. But if GP is right about their attitude, it saddens me. Can't there be a middle ground? Like, promoting free software and still helping people getting things done in the world we live right now?
  - rekado 4y ago
    No, they are not right about the attitude. We just don't do proprietary software and so discussing it on our channels is off topic and distracting. "Go fuck yourself" is much stronger, much ruder attitude. On the #guix IRC channel you'll often get a private message to direct you to other channels where it's fine to discuss proprietary software and how to make it work on Guix.
    - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
      I'm not attempting to construe that the attitude is GFY. From the perspective of someone who is enjoying this tool and ecosystem and wants to do something, but the community is trying very hard to enforce beliefs that are incompatible, it sure tastes like I'm being told to go fuck myself. Does it feel good to you when you ask a question and the reply you get is "this isn't for you"? Requiring a private reply on an IRC server to unblock a comically common use case is exactly the problem I am trying to highlight.
klardotsh 4y ago
I think much like how there's Nix and NixOS, it's important to draw a line between Guix (the package manager) and GuixSD (the Linux distribution). Guix the package manager, while still not usable at work for me (lack of MacOS support - just 4 of my eng org's ~25 folks use Linux), is full of interesting ideas and features that work well in Linux settings, and can do useful things. It could make interesting dev shells, for example, much like nix-shell (or Flakes). GuixSD without `nonguix`? Yeah, I unfortunately share your "it's dead in the water" opinion here. I'm not aware of much, if any, modern hardware that can fully boot to a usable-framerate GUI with networking (and that is also safe to use for such) without at least linux-firmware, which I believe is only available in nonguix. If there's exceptions to this, I'd genuinely love to hear them in a thread here.
- rekado 4y ago
  The importance of proprietary software is quite overstated in my opinion. I've used stock Guix System on a large number of off-the-shelf servers and not once did I encounter missing drivers. I've used Guix System with linux-libre on old Sun hardware and the newest Dell servers --- never once did I have a problem due to the linux-libre kernel. "dead in the water" looks different.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    It sounds like the person you are replying to is talking about the desktop use case rather than servers.
    - klardotsh 4y ago
      Correct, I was, though I think it's fair to split GuixSD into server and desktop usecases and consider them separately. If it works for one and not the other, cool, maybe doing what Alpine did and billing Guix System for specifically server cases could work? (I still have outstanding questions in that realm in parent thread)
  - klardotsh 4y ago
    My understanding is that linux-libre strips CPU microcode as well, which is often used to patch hardware vulnerabilities - what's the recourse for such issues on servers like these, on GuixSD?
sierkov 4y ago
> I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. I'm using Guix for work, at home, my wife has Guix on her gaming laptop with nvidia card, playing games on steam. Nobody has any problems with enabling rpmfusion repo on Fedora, using aur on Arch, adding backports repo for kde or whatever on ubuntu. But as soon as it's nonguix channel it's suddenly a problem. Huh. It's literally just a channel and ultimately it is still same Guix. "What's that? NONGUIX? Hell no, I ain't having Guix working on my hardware! I don't want a better experience using Guix! Not in a million years!" And then: > Guix has truly noble goals (in classic GNU fashion) but they're ultimately misguided. > Actually useless. Which are really big claims with nothing to back them up. > The standard encouraged response to "Hi I'm a new Guix user and I was wondering how I can run steam?" is roughly equivalent to "Go fuck yourself" and I'm just amazed by that. Look, if you can't figure out how to `guix install flatpak' and then flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam, then... well, I've nothing to say actually.
- jyrkesh 4y ago
  > well, I've nothing to say actually. That's definitely better than "go fuck yourself". "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" and all that. Tbh, I've seen the "go fuck yourself" attitude in almost every Free Software community I've spent time around. It's really just a matter of whether it's encouraged, tolerated, or actively rejected by the project maintainers and influencers. I would hope that someone writing a blog post this positive would be one of the "actively rejecting" folks, but I really don't know anything about Guix (hadn't heard of it until this post). I will say that I run NixOS on my primary home server, and while there's definitely a learning curve there, the community I've experienced is largely very helpful, friendly, and positive. Now that I've got most of it working the way I want, I don't see myself moving to something else any time soon (it's absolutely rock solid).
- 3836293648 4y ago
  If you're just turning to flatpak, why are you even using guix in the first place?
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biotinker 4y ago
> If I can't get stuff done with it it's useless. Actually useless. I think the very article we're commenting on here shows that it is very definitely not actually useless, it may merely have a different true use than is readily apparent.
gorjusborg 4y ago
> If Guix ever becomes mainstream, it will be in spite of their efforts. Why is ‘become mainstream’ some aspirational goal? What would that even mean? Making a viable operating system is valuable without having it be the the one everyone uses.

caslon 4y ago

Have you considered the idea that it might just not be for you? There are plenty of workflows that don't require proprietary software, and adding proprietary software breaks a lot of the point of Guix, along with throwing more work onto the backs of maintainers. You wouldn't expect a bunch of people giving away a vegetarian cookbook to respond super well to, "This is all fine and great and all, but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog?" Especially not after saying their project was pointless since you couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat.

ivalm 4y ago
> but how can I adapt this recipe to grilled dog > couldn't easily use it to shish kebab your cat This seems like an unnecessarily hostile response, kind of inline with what the OP mentioned.
- caslon 4y ago
  It's not particularly hostile. It's using an example to demonstrate that someone who sees an action as unethical won't be super hyped about you asking them to spend their time assisting you in doing something they find to be unethical, especially after you insult them for thinking it's unethical.
xhevahir 4y ago
To continue with your analogy: this sounds more like instructing other vegetarians to refuse to help any meat eaters who would like to alter a vegetarian recipe.
- caslon 4y ago
  It's more like saying "Not in my house, thanks." Which is totally sensible!
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
Who is it for then? Everyone on the planet I have ever interacted with uses proprietary software daily. What are these mythical workflows? Am I only supposed to use Guix when it's convenient for their philosophy? nonguix is proof that adding proprietary software doesn't break diddly squat. It's all just gatekeeping. They could still achieve all their goals without being zealous, whether you believe me or not.
- rekado 4y ago
  I really can't understand your attitude here. Guix makes it trivial to add other channels, such as nonguix, providing first-class packages. You can easily add proprietary software to Guix. It's just not part of Guix, because that's not the point of the project. Your "non-mythical" workflows that depend on proprietary workflows are not in any way impeded. You are projecting zealotry and gatekeeping (both terms with strong negative connotation) onto the project. And I must say that your attitude does nothing to advance your point, however deeply buried in hostile rhetoric it may be. As to mythical workflows without proprietary software: I'm not using proprietary software. Not on my laptops, my home network, my servers at work. Not because I'm some sort of "zealot", but because I simply have no need for it. It's really quite odd to observe how worked up you get in response to seeing a community that is content with not using proprietary software.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    My point is that Guix, the software, the documentation and the community are not user friendly. I'm happy that you have no need for proprietary software, that sounds nice. I do have such a need. It took me a stunning amount of time to find nonguix and figure it out. The community was not helpful. Figuring out how to use proprietary software with Guix is a miserable experience. As a new, curious user, I was told: I won't receive help, I can't discuss it, I shouldn't use proprietary software, that Guix isn't for me. This is not a welcoming response. It's not useful. It's hostile. It's zealotry. Instead, a welcoming response would be to say yeah, that's unfortunate but understandable, maybe help educate why free software is important, and suggest a path forward, such as pointing the user to unofficial channels. By comparison, Nix excels here -- There is no hostility. It's like being told by a mathematician that I shouldn't use math to calculate my taxes because taxes are unethical and illegal. Yeah that's nice, but I still have to pay them. I just want to calculate my taxes.

hosh 4y ago

Back when the idea of “open source” came around, I thought the same. That the ideals of Free Software were too idealistic, and open source is pragmatic and commercially friendly. Fast forward fifteen years and I am finding that Richard Stallman was right. Despite the commercial success of open source, I have found that usefulness does not always lead to a healthy society. (And I am aware that, zealotry and fanaticism have their own issues). It’s not that I am a purist. Nix is still more practical. I have also heard that Nix and Guix can run on the same machine. However, I think Guix and Free Software conserve principles that I think are important for our society and civilization.

k__ 4y ago
I personally didn't use Guix or interacted with its community in any way. But if GP is right about their attitude, it saddens me. Can't there be a middle ground? Like, promoting free software and still helping people getting things done in the world we live right now?
- rekado 4y ago
  No, they are not right about the attitude. We just don't do proprietary software and so discussing it on our channels is off topic and distracting. "Go fuck yourself" is much stronger, much ruder attitude. On the #guix IRC channel you'll often get a private message to direct you to other channels where it's fine to discuss proprietary software and how to make it work on Guix.
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    I'm not attempting to construe that the attitude is GFY. From the perspective of someone who is enjoying this tool and ecosystem and wants to do something, but the community is trying very hard to enforce beliefs that are incompatible, it sure tastes like I'm being told to go fuck myself. Does it feel good to you when you ask a question and the reply you get is "this isn't for you"? Requiring a private reply on an IRC server to unblock a comically common use case is exactly the problem I am trying to highlight.

klardotsh 4y ago

I think much like how there's Nix and NixOS, it's important to draw a line between Guix (the package manager) and GuixSD (the Linux distribution). Guix the package manager, while still not usable at work for me (lack of MacOS support - just 4 of my eng org's ~25 folks use Linux), is full of interesting ideas and features that work well in Linux settings, and can do useful things. It could make interesting dev shells, for example, much like nix-shell (or Flakes). GuixSD without `nonguix`? Yeah, I unfortunately share your "it's dead in the water" opinion here. I'm not aware of much, if any, modern hardware that can fully boot to a usable-framerate GUI with networking (and that is also safe to use for such) without at least linux-firmware, which I believe is only available in nonguix. If there's exceptions to this, I'd genuinely love to hear them in a thread here.

rekado 4y ago
The importance of proprietary software is quite overstated in my opinion. I've used stock Guix System on a large number of off-the-shelf servers and not once did I encounter missing drivers. I've used Guix System with linux-libre on old Sun hardware and the newest Dell servers --- never once did I have a problem due to the linux-libre kernel. "dead in the water" looks different.
- colordrops 4y ago
  It sounds like the person you are replying to is talking about the desktop use case rather than servers.
  - klardotsh 4y ago
    Correct, I was, though I think it's fair to split GuixSD into server and desktop usecases and consider them separately. If it works for one and not the other, cool, maybe doing what Alpine did and billing Guix System for specifically server cases could work? (I still have outstanding questions in that realm in parent thread)
- klardotsh 4y ago
  My understanding is that linux-libre strips CPU microcode as well, which is often used to patch hardware vulnerabilities - what's the recourse for such issues on servers like these, on GuixSD?

sierkov 4y ago

> I can use Nix at work, at home, with family, with vendors, with binary blobs, on macOS. I'm using Guix for work, at home, my wife has Guix on her gaming laptop with nvidia card, playing games on steam. Nobody has any problems with enabling rpmfusion repo on Fedora, using aur on Arch, adding backports repo for kde or whatever on ubuntu. But as soon as it's nonguix channel it's suddenly a problem. Huh. It's literally just a channel and ultimately it is still same Guix. "What's that? NONGUIX? Hell no, I ain't having Guix working on my hardware! I don't want a better experience using Guix! Not in a million years!" And then: > Guix has truly noble goals (in classic GNU fashion) but they're ultimately misguided. > Actually useless. Which are really big claims with nothing to back them up. > The standard encouraged response to "Hi I'm a new Guix user and I was wondering how I can run steam?" is roughly equivalent to "Go fuck yourself" and I'm just amazed by that. Look, if you can't figure out how to `guix install flatpak' and then flatpak install com.valvesoftware.Steam, then... well, I've nothing to say actually.

jyrkesh 4y ago
> well, I've nothing to say actually. That's definitely better than "go fuck yourself". "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" and all that. Tbh, I've seen the "go fuck yourself" attitude in almost every Free Software community I've spent time around. It's really just a matter of whether it's encouraged, tolerated, or actively rejected by the project maintainers and influencers. I would hope that someone writing a blog post this positive would be one of the "actively rejecting" folks, but I really don't know anything about Guix (hadn't heard of it until this post). I will say that I run NixOS on my primary home server, and while there's definitely a learning curve there, the community I've experienced is largely very helpful, friendly, and positive. Now that I've got most of it working the way I want, I don't see myself moving to something else any time soon (it's absolutely rock solid).
3836293648 4y ago
If you're just turning to flatpak, why are you even using guix in the first place?
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biotinker 4y ago

> If I can't get stuff done with it it's useless. Actually useless. I think the very article we're commenting on here shows that it is very definitely not actually useless, it may merely have a different true use than is readily apparent.

gorjusborg 4y ago

> If Guix ever becomes mainstream, it will be in spite of their efforts. Why is ‘become mainstream’ some aspirational goal? What would that even mean? Making a viable operating system is valuable without having it be the the one everyone uses.