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I have felt spoiled by GNU Guix honestly. It has documentation that is comparable to Gentoo or Arch, power over your system that generally matches Gentoo (thoug

I have felt spoiled by GNU Guix honestly. It has documentation that is comparable to Gentoo or Arch, power over your system that generally matches Gentoo (though a system-wide equivalent of USE flags is not yet available, individual packages can be configured), the ease of maintenance of a system like Fedora Silverblue, and one of the most approachable communities I have ever dealt with. I highly recommend playing around with it :)

xcdzvyn 3y ago
Interesting, so the docs are better than Nix'? I've been meaning to finally figure out LISP, I'd be willing to use this as an excuse!
- Zambyte 3y ago
  I used Nix for a few months several years ago, so their documentation is probably better now than I was when I used it, but yeah, I find the Guix documentation to be much more pleasant to use than the Nix documentation was when I used it. This is partially because it uses an existing language, rather than a home grown language. Guix was also my entry point for learning Lisp, and the abundance of learning material for the language will probably always dwarf that of Nixs homegrown language. I actually watched all of the SICP lectures; I found that to be an incredible resource to get my footing. It's also important to note that Guixs documentation is readily available on the system using the GNU info utility, which if you're not familiar with, is like man but on steroids. If you use Kagi, I also made this lens[0] that allows one to search through the web version of the documentation, the mailing list archives, and the IRC logs all at once using !guix. [0] https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8
  - kriiuuu 3y ago
    I use nix and the documentation is dogwater. It’s the best system I have ever used, but by god you need to get your hands dirty with it for a while.
    - spost 3y ago
      Having spoken to a some people involved with the project, my understanding is that there's a significant schism between factions "Flakes are unfinished software, and our documentation should not focus on them" and "Flakes are what the majority of the userbase is using, and we should document them". I hope this will eventually get better if Flakes are ever stabilized.
lambdaba 3y ago
What are the technical merits of Guix compared to Nix? Also, what's the situation with unfree packages? And package availability in general?
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Guix started as a fork of Nix, but I believe all original Nix code has been replaced with Guix specific code at this point. Core functionality is pretty comparable between the two of them. Two differences I can tell you immediately is that GNU Guix has a built in user home configuration management system[0], and Nix depends on an external module to do the same[1]. NixOS, like most distros uses systemd for it's init system. GNU Guix uses Shepherd[2]. Honestly it hasn't really been much of a point of note in my experience, but it's probably worth mentioning as a difference. Regarding Free vs non-Free packages: this can be a pain point if your system requires non-Free packages to function on GNU Guix. I (like most other Guix users I would guess) use the nonguix[3] channel for additional packages. One of my systems requires the baseline Linux kernel for propriety Ethernet drivers (included in Linux because of GPLv2 :P), so I had to create a custom installation ISO with the baseline kernel. This probably sounds horrifying, but creating a custom installation ISO is actually very easy in Guix (and probably Nix as well). It's the only distro I've ever done it for. But between the main Guix channel, nonguix, and Flatpak, it's very uncommon that I cannot find what I want. According to repology[4], Guix is the #5 repo for most packages. And the few packages that I have wanted that were missing, I have actually been able to contribute package definitions for upstream to Guix, since the process is very easy and well documented (also the only distro I have ever done that for). [0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration.... [1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd [3] https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix [4] https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/
  - nextos 3y ago
    An interesting advantage of Guix over Nix is having better options for runtime isolation. Nix is not well developed in this area yet, although one can always use bwrap or AppArmor to implement something ad hoc. Besides, Guix uses Scheme everywhere, whereas Nix is a mix of the Nix language and lots of shell code. The Nix language is a pretty elegant lazy functional language, and yields very compact and clean code. But if you want to do complex things, Scheme might be easier.
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xcdzvyn 3y ago

Interesting, so the docs are better than Nix'? I've been meaning to finally figure out LISP, I'd be willing to use this as an excuse!

Zambyte 3y ago
I used Nix for a few months several years ago, so their documentation is probably better now than I was when I used it, but yeah, I find the Guix documentation to be much more pleasant to use than the Nix documentation was when I used it. This is partially because it uses an existing language, rather than a home grown language. Guix was also my entry point for learning Lisp, and the abundance of learning material for the language will probably always dwarf that of Nixs homegrown language. I actually watched all of the SICP lectures; I found that to be an incredible resource to get my footing. It's also important to note that Guixs documentation is readily available on the system using the GNU info utility, which if you're not familiar with, is like man but on steroids. If you use Kagi, I also made this lens[0] that allows one to search through the web version of the documentation, the mailing list archives, and the IRC logs all at once using !guix. [0] https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8 https://kagi.com/lenses/l7mPOuJp7zljHquBjsekFn6dM9Thw1A8
- kriiuuu 3y ago
  I use nix and the documentation is dogwater. It’s the best system I have ever used, but by god you need to get your hands dirty with it for a while.
  - spost 3y ago
    Having spoken to a some people involved with the project, my understanding is that there's a significant schism between factions "Flakes are unfinished software, and our documentation should not focus on them" and "Flakes are what the majority of the userbase is using, and we should document them". I hope this will eventually get better if Flakes are ever stabilized.

lambdaba 3y ago

What are the technical merits of Guix compared to Nix? Also, what's the situation with unfree packages? And package availability in general?

Zambyte 3y ago
Guix started as a fork of Nix, but I believe all original Nix code has been replaced with Guix specific code at this point. Core functionality is pretty comparable between the two of them. Two differences I can tell you immediately is that GNU Guix has a built in user home configuration management system[0], and Nix depends on an external module to do the same[1]. NixOS, like most distros uses systemd for it's init system. GNU Guix uses Shepherd[2]. Honestly it hasn't really been much of a point of note in my experience, but it's probably worth mentioning as a difference. Regarding Free vs non-Free packages: this can be a pain point if your system requires non-Free packages to function on GNU Guix. I (like most other Guix users I would guess) use the nonguix[3] channel for additional packages. One of my systems requires the baseline Linux kernel for propriety Ethernet drivers (included in Linux because of GPLv2 :P), so I had to create a custom installation ISO with the baseline kernel. This probably sounds horrifying, but creating a custom installation ISO is actually very easy in Guix (and probably Nix as well). It's the only distro I've ever done it for. But between the main Guix channel, nonguix, and Flatpak, it's very uncommon that I cannot find what I want. According to repology[4], Guix is the #5 repo for most packages. And the few packages that I have wanted that were missing, I have actually been able to contribute package definitions for upstream to Guix, since the process is very easy and well documented (also the only distro I have ever done that for). [0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Home-Configuration.... [1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd [3] https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix [4] https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/
- nextos 3y ago
  An interesting advantage of Guix over Nix is having better options for runtime isolation. Nix is not well developed in this area yet, although one can always use bwrap or AppArmor to implement something ad hoc. Besides, Guix uses Scheme everywhere, whereas Nix is a mix of the Nix language and lots of shell code. The Nix language is a pretty elegant lazy functional language, and yields very compact and clean code. But if you want to do complex things, Scheme might be easier.

deleted 3y ago

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