6 ms·

Guix for Development

138 points by clircle 9mo ago

pmarreck 8mo ago
both guix and nix are 1000% better for setting up and managing per-project deps deterministically
davexunit 8mo ago
Always interesting to see an older article come back around. I could probably update this a bit for 2026 but my workflow is just about the same now as it was then. Guix is good and just released 1.5.0, check it out.
- herewulf 8mo ago
  (Small) discussion of the release. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732047
smnplk 8mo ago
Guix looks really tempting to me because i find guile scheme so much more pleasant than nix. But i heard there are not that many packages in Guix. I wonder if some sort of transpiler from nix derivations to guix package definitions would be possible.
- whompyjaw 8mo ago
  Im with you. As an emacsen, i feel it’s natural for me to use Guix, but nix is so so much more popular… :/
  - digiown 8mo ago
    Guix being a GNU project the purism also doesn't help. Just look at this: https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix I don't even disagree that nonfree software is bad, but blaming the users who often have no choice in the matter (e.g. drivers) is the wrong way to go.
    - herewulf 8mo ago
      It's a little inconvenient but for example my Framework laptop Intel WiFi chip requires a binary blob and I want aware of this. Now that I am, I can make better hardware purchasing decisions. There are plenty of alternatives that don't require that blob and it's the only thing I need from the no free channel.
      - freeopinion 8mo ago
        Are there really a lot of alternative Wifi chips that don't require closed blobs? Do you have a list? Are they found in any laptop that is reasonably available on the market? I don't think that Guix is punishing users by not supporting non-libre hardware. They are making a choice in what they develop and anybody of similar mind can join their effort. The nonguix folks are practical. It just stinks that nothing ships with a Wifi chip that doesn't require nonguix pragmatism.
        civodul 8mo ago
        There are some relatively widespread WiFi chipsets for which free firmware is available: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Considerations.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Cons... Unfortunately, it's hard to be sure when you buy a WiFi device whether it has the right chipset. Also, most laptops come with Intel WiFi, and that requires non-free firmware.
      - digiown 8mo ago
        I really don't think you can gain much realistic freedom going without the blob. The powers that be will never let you have a freely modifiable radio transceiver. The blob is better viewed as a part of the hardware in this case. What's most likely to happen to get rid of the blob is to just put it on the non-modifiable parts of the device. Viewed in this way, the blob is at least something you can practically inspect, unlike the firmware on the chip itself. See also the discussion on CPU microcode: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...
      - 8mo ago
- heavyset_go 8mo ago
  This is where I'm at after using Nix for a few years for different use cases. I never want to write it again, and would welcome a Scheme over Nix.
- herewulf 8mo ago
  You can run Nix packages on Guix if there isn't a "native" package for it. Look at nix-service. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Services.html#:~:text=Nix%20service https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Miscellaneous... I've never felt the need myself. If something is missing, I add it and I think that is the real fun in running Guix because creating your own well defined package or service is deeply rewarding. Anyway, you can find people using it in the wild either by search engine[1] or with Toys[2] which is also handy for finding examples of missing packages too. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=%22config.scm%22+nix-service https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=%22config.scm%22+nix-servic... [2]: https://toys.whereis.social https://toys.whereis.social
  - createaccount99 8mo ago
    You can stop recommending that flow (nix on guix), it's not good. You'll know if you try it.
    - mghackerlady 8mo ago
      is it good? of course not, but it is an option
  - smnplk 8mo ago
    Thanks, I'll check it out.
- arminiusreturns 8mo ago
  Now if we could just get people to combine Guix and other guile scheme packages that are awesome like mcron into their stacks, and then backfeed more fixes into the ecosystem, we have a real chance at helping GNUland!
- benreesman 8mo ago
  I compile nix derivations to well-posed effect/coeffect/graded monad algebra so I can do real bill of materials and build on an action cache engine maintained by professionals, but that's mostly for long-tail stuff. These days with a la carte access to all of the container ecosystem primitives as nice, ergonomic, orthogonal operations I don't really see the value in nixpkgs. Don't really see the value in a container registry either: a correctly attested content addressable store with some DNS abbreviations is 100 lines of code because mostly it's git and an S3 shim. The category error at the heart of nixpkgs is that the environment in which software is compiled need resemble the environment in which it executes. Silly stuff. So whether you're a patchelf --rpath ... Person or an unshare --bind-mount Enjoyer (isomorphic), just remember, in 2026 the guy with the daemon that runs as root does not want you to have nice things.
- sidkshatriya 8mo ago
  The nix language is maximally lazy. It does not evaluate things it does not need to. This is good because you don't want it to burn CPU building things (very expensive expressions!!) that it will ultimately not need for final derivation. I'm wondering if guix scheme is suited well for this task: (a) evaluation is eager (b) lots of variable mutation. But perhaps lazy evaluation and lack of variable mutation in guix scheme is not such a problem after all for a nix _like_ system -- I don't know.
  - atiedebee 8mo ago
    Im very familiar with Nix or the language, but why would interpreting guile scheme for package management be expensive? What are guix and nix doing that would require evaluating everything lazily for good enough performance?
    - Hasnep 8mo ago
      It's not the Nix/Guile that's expensive, it's situations like: let chromium = pkgs.chromium; in 1 + 1 In a maximally eager language you'd need to wait for the entirety of Chromium to build before you can find out what 1 + 1 is.
      - atiedebee 8mo ago
        I checked the spec and Scheme R5RS does have lazy evaluation in the form of promises using "delay" and "force", but I can see why explicitly having to put those everywhere isn't a good solution.
  - helibom 8mo ago
    I'm still new to both Guile and Guix, but I've been reading the Guile and Guix reference manuals recently and I think some of your concerns about eager vs. lazy evaluation of packages are addressed by Guile's quoting mechanism, more specifically "quasiquote" [1]. This quoting mechanism allows passing around references to package definitions and whatnot, without actually evaluating those expressions until build time. Guix extends quasiquote to create something called "G-expressions" [2], which are even more so fitted to something like the Guix/Nix build system. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Expression-Syntax.html#index-quasiquote https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Expressi... 2. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/guix.html#G_002dExpressions https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/guix.html#G_002dExpress...
- Zambyte 8mo ago
  You can just visit https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/ and see that GNU Guix has the 5th largest repository, ahead of Fedora and Gentoo. This does not include any proprietary packages, which can be added using https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix (though gitlab seems to be dying for me right now?) I've been running GNU Guix for five years now, after lots of distro hopping, including to and from NixOS. I left Nix because I found the documentation (particularly regarding the language) to be a struggle to work with (though I imagine it's improved since then). GNU Guix + nonguix + flatpak is perfectly suitable for everyday use.
arikrahman 8mo ago
Honestly I'm just glad that this declarative approach is steadily being realized. It hasn't hit mainstream adoption yet, but it gives me hope that this headline is making the rounds. Docker is, as the article describes, just a bandaid and the symptom of unthoughful development foundations. In the long term, Guix may win out. Probably not in my life time though. But it's a win for developers, and nix really isn't so bad with everyone vibecoding away it's complexity anyways.
- herewulf 8mo ago
  You can even generate Docker images deterministically with Guix. :)
- wswin 8mo ago
  I think they're two different tools. Containers are great for production environments. Beside reproducibility, they also give control over resources and manage virtual devices. Things that are rather not needed during development.
  - akshitgaur2005 8mo ago
    That is also an option with guix --container
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
esperent 8mo ago
> Dockerfiles are clunky and the rather extreme level of isolation is usually unnecessary and makes things overly complicated I agree, for local development docker is often overkill. However, for production it's absolutely not overkill. And since pretty much all projects are intended for production at some point, they'll need a Dockerfile and docker compose or some other equivalent. And at that point, you're maintaining the Dockerfile anyway, so why not use it for local dev as well? That way your dev and production environments can be close to identical. Guix looks nice - probably nicer than docker for dev work. But is it nice enough to justify maintaining two separate systems and have your dev and production diverge?
- dominicm 8mo ago
  While not directly mentioned in this article, guix pack[1] allows you to distribute your software in multiple formats, including Docker images. The general philosophy of Guix is to have a single definition for how to build your software and use it for the entire dev to production pipeline. [1]: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...
- skavi 8mo ago
  In Nix (and, I’d assume, for Guix) you can go the other way around: https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles. As a side benefit, the generated docker image can be very tiny.
  - valorzard 8mo ago
    Yeah Guix has a Dockerfile export
- otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
  You'd be nuts to run the Docker daemon anywhere near production.
  - afarviral 8mo ago
goranmoomin 8mo ago
I feel like declarative container-like dev environments (e.g. nix shell or guix shell, and so on) will become much more popular in the following years with the rise of LLM agentic tools. It seems that the aformentioned tools provide much more value when they can get full access to the dev environment. Sprites[0], exe.dev[1], and more services seem to be focusing on providing instant VMs for these use cases, but for me it seems like it's a waste for users to have to ssh into a separate cloud server (and feel the latency) just to get a clean dev environment. I feel that a similar tool where you can get a clean slate dev environment from a declarative description locally, without all of the overhead and the weight of Docker or VMs would be very welcomed. (Note: I am not trying to inject AI-hype on a Guix-related post, I do realize that the audience of LLM tools and Guix would be quite different, this is just an observation) [0]: https://sprites.dev https://sprites.dev [1]: https://exe.dev https://exe.dev
- attila-lendvai 8mo ago
  random note: there's `guix shell --container --emulate-fhs`.
- sdsd 8mo ago
  As a Guix lover and LLM tooling enthusiast, I complete agree. Administrating my system via Claude Code is so much easier. LLMs work better on a system that's hackable via text.
sohrob 8mo ago
I wanted to go all-in on Guix but the installation process was made too difficult due to the lack of non-free software available during install time. I wish they would take the Debian approach and leave it up to the user to decide which packages they would like installed on their system or not.
- icen 8mo ago
  There’s nonguix for access to non free drivers and such. I think that system crafters have some installable images if you don’t have a current guix install to build one It’s regrettable that this is necessary, but with so few Ethernet ports on laptops it’s harder to install these things without access to WiFi.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
rudhdb773b 8mo ago
I love Guix documentation, but unfortunately I've had to stick with Nix because its more polished with a large library of packages. LLMs have also made writing syntacticly correct Nix scripts much easier, so I don't miss Guix's Guile that much.
tetris11 8mo ago
I love Guile over Nix syntax, but the one killer feature Nix has that Guix doesn’t is making a single static binary of common programs and then deploying them elsewhere. In Nix, this is a single flag. In Guix, you either deploy with all libraries on a custom /guix path, or nothing.
- dhon_ 8mo ago
  How do you do it in nix?
  - r14c 8mo ago
    Sounds like nix-bundle, but that's not a standard feature.
    - tetris11 8mo ago
      nix build nixpkgs#pkgsStatic.emacs So, it's not so much a static build from a flag, as it is a large corpus of statically defined recipes independent from the other packages that you can build from
- kwk1 8mo ago
  Is `guix pack` not sufficient for this? https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...
  - tetris11 8mo ago
    No, it produces a tree of libraries that you have to untar on the host machine. If you dont have root, then unpacking to /gnu/store is impossible
    - kwk1 8mo ago
      I checked and it looks like the root-required issue has been addressed with a --relocatable flag, and there are a few options as well for needing to untar, e.g. producing an appimage format output.
bflesch 8mo ago
How is the scheme syntax in any way an improvement over JSON? Can't they build the same thing but use JSON - which everyone already uses - instead of pushing a new verbose syntax?
- cess11 8mo ago
  I think it would be tricky to develop a package manager in JSON.
nickez 8mo ago
What if a piece of software isn't packaged, like for example the ARM GCC toolchain. In a Dockerfile I just need to curl and unpack it. How do I solve that with guix?
- KnightHawk3 8mo ago
  I use nix, but I assume the same goes for guix, you write a package or run it with something that emulates a FHS (like steam-run, don't mind the name) and hope it works. Writing a package is not as bad as it sounds, nix and guix have very little difference between "package maintainer" and "user" so most users probably can package software. Normally copying something from nixpkgs or similar will get you most the way there.
anthk 8mo ago
Guix asking for donations from propietary websites it's a disgrace to GNU. But i woudn't expect less from some hijackers. https://guix.gnu.org/donate/ https://guix.gnu.org/donate/ Proof: https://donate.stripe.com/8x2bJ133ia2H3Zw4j38N201 https://donate.stripe.com/8x2bJ133ia2H3Zw4j38N201 https://donate.stripe.com/aFaeVd7jy7Uz1Ro02N8N204 https://donate.stripe.com/aFaeVd7jy7Uz1Ro02N8N204 https://donate.stripe.com/dRm5kD47m0s79jQ9Dn8N202 https://donate.stripe.com/dRm5kD47m0s79jQ9Dn8N202
- davexunit 8mo ago
  Go away.
  - anthk 8mo ago
    Go cry me a river. How can I donate to some platforms advertised by Guix with just running free software as you state? Go on. Explain us.
pshirshov 8mo ago
But flakes are more sound and more convenient!
- r14c 8mo ago
  I do wish guix had something like flakes
civodul 8mo ago
On the same topic, check out this how-to on software development with Guix from the Cookbook (author here): https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Software-Development.html https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Software-Developm... The idea was to show that there are several "levels" to take advantage of Guix for development, where the `guix.scm` file in David Thompson's blog post is the first level.

138 points by clircle 9mo ago

both guix and nix are 1000% better for setting up and managing per-project deps deterministically

Always interesting to see an older article come back around. I could probably update this a bit for 2026 but my workflow is just about the same now as it was then. Guix is good and just released 1.5.0, check it out.

herewulf 8mo ago
(Small) discussion of the release. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732047

smnplk 8mo ago

Guix looks really tempting to me because i find guile scheme so much more pleasant than nix. But i heard there are not that many packages in Guix. I wonder if some sort of transpiler from nix derivations to guix package definitions would be possible.

whompyjaw 8mo ago
Im with you. As an emacsen, i feel it’s natural for me to use Guix, but nix is so so much more popular… :/
- digiown 8mo ago
  Guix being a GNU project the purism also doesn't help. Just look at this: https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix I don't even disagree that nonfree software is bad, but blaming the users who often have no choice in the matter (e.g. drivers) is the wrong way to go.
  - herewulf 8mo ago
    It's a little inconvenient but for example my Framework laptop Intel WiFi chip requires a binary blob and I want aware of this. Now that I am, I can make better hardware purchasing decisions. There are plenty of alternatives that don't require that blob and it's the only thing I need from the no free channel.
    - freeopinion 8mo ago
      Are there really a lot of alternative Wifi chips that don't require closed blobs? Do you have a list? Are they found in any laptop that is reasonably available on the market? I don't think that Guix is punishing users by not supporting non-libre hardware. They are making a choice in what they develop and anybody of similar mind can join their effort. The nonguix folks are practical. It just stinks that nothing ships with a Wifi chip that doesn't require nonguix pragmatism.
      - civodul 8mo ago
        There are some relatively widespread WiFi chipsets for which free firmware is available: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Considerations.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Hardware-Cons... Unfortunately, it's hard to be sure when you buy a WiFi device whether it has the right chipset. Also, most laptops come with Intel WiFi, and that requires non-free firmware.
    - digiown 8mo ago
      I really don't think you can gain much realistic freedom going without the blob. The powers that be will never let you have a freely modifiable radio transceiver. The blob is better viewed as a part of the hardware in this case. What's most likely to happen to get rid of the blob is to just put it on the non-modifiable parts of the device. Viewed in this way, the blob is at least something you can practically inspect, unlike the firmware on the chip itself. See also the discussion on CPU microcode: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...
    - 8mo ago
heavyset_go 8mo ago
This is where I'm at after using Nix for a few years for different use cases. I never want to write it again, and would welcome a Scheme over Nix.
herewulf 8mo ago
You can run Nix packages on Guix if there isn't a "native" package for it. Look at nix-service. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Services.html#:~:text=Nix%20service https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Miscellaneous... I've never felt the need myself. If something is missing, I add it and I think that is the real fun in running Guix because creating your own well defined package or service is deeply rewarding. Anyway, you can find people using it in the wild either by search engine[1] or with Toys[2] which is also handy for finding examples of missing packages too. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=%22config.scm%22+nix-service https://duckduckgo.com/?t=fpas&q=%22config.scm%22+nix-servic... [2]: https://toys.whereis.social https://toys.whereis.social
- createaccount99 8mo ago
  You can stop recommending that flow (nix on guix), it's not good. You'll know if you try it.
  - mghackerlady 8mo ago
    is it good? of course not, but it is an option
- smnplk 8mo ago
  Thanks, I'll check it out.
arminiusreturns 8mo ago
Now if we could just get people to combine Guix and other guile scheme packages that are awesome like mcron into their stacks, and then backfeed more fixes into the ecosystem, we have a real chance at helping GNUland!
benreesman 8mo ago
I compile nix derivations to well-posed effect/coeffect/graded monad algebra so I can do real bill of materials and build on an action cache engine maintained by professionals, but that's mostly for long-tail stuff. These days with a la carte access to all of the container ecosystem primitives as nice, ergonomic, orthogonal operations I don't really see the value in nixpkgs. Don't really see the value in a container registry either: a correctly attested content addressable store with some DNS abbreviations is 100 lines of code because mostly it's git and an S3 shim. The category error at the heart of nixpkgs is that the environment in which software is compiled need resemble the environment in which it executes. Silly stuff. So whether you're a patchelf --rpath ... Person or an unshare --bind-mount Enjoyer (isomorphic), just remember, in 2026 the guy with the daemon that runs as root does not want you to have nice things.
sidkshatriya 8mo ago
The nix language is maximally lazy. It does not evaluate things it does not need to. This is good because you don't want it to burn CPU building things (very expensive expressions!!) that it will ultimately not need for final derivation. I'm wondering if guix scheme is suited well for this task: (a) evaluation is eager (b) lots of variable mutation. But perhaps lazy evaluation and lack of variable mutation in guix scheme is not such a problem after all for a nix _like_ system -- I don't know.
- atiedebee 8mo ago
  Im very familiar with Nix or the language, but why would interpreting guile scheme for package management be expensive? What are guix and nix doing that would require evaluating everything lazily for good enough performance?
  - Hasnep 8mo ago
    It's not the Nix/Guile that's expensive, it's situations like: let chromium = pkgs.chromium; in 1 + 1 In a maximally eager language you'd need to wait for the entirety of Chromium to build before you can find out what 1 + 1 is.
    - atiedebee 8mo ago
      I checked the spec and Scheme R5RS does have lazy evaluation in the form of promises using "delay" and "force", but I can see why explicitly having to put those everywhere isn't a good solution.
- helibom 8mo ago
  I'm still new to both Guile and Guix, but I've been reading the Guile and Guix reference manuals recently and I think some of your concerns about eager vs. lazy evaluation of packages are addressed by Guile's quoting mechanism, more specifically "quasiquote" [1]. This quoting mechanism allows passing around references to package definitions and whatnot, without actually evaluating those expressions until build time. Guix extends quasiquote to create something called "G-expressions" [2], which are even more so fitted to something like the Guix/Nix build system. 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Expression-Syntax.html#index-quasiquote https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Expressi... 2. https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/guix.html#G_002dExpressions https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/guix.html#G_002dExpress...
Zambyte 8mo ago
You can just visit https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/ and see that GNU Guix has the 5th largest repository, ahead of Fedora and Gentoo. This does not include any proprietary packages, which can be added using https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix (though gitlab seems to be dying for me right now?) I've been running GNU Guix for five years now, after lots of distro hopping, including to and from NixOS. I left Nix because I found the documentation (particularly regarding the language) to be a struggle to work with (though I imagine it's improved since then). GNU Guix + nonguix + flatpak is perfectly suitable for everyday use.

arikrahman 8mo ago

Honestly I'm just glad that this declarative approach is steadily being realized. It hasn't hit mainstream adoption yet, but it gives me hope that this headline is making the rounds. Docker is, as the article describes, just a bandaid and the symptom of unthoughful development foundations. In the long term, Guix may win out. Probably not in my life time though. But it's a win for developers, and nix really isn't so bad with everyone vibecoding away it's complexity anyways.

herewulf 8mo ago
You can even generate Docker images deterministically with Guix. :)
wswin 8mo ago
I think they're two different tools. Containers are great for production environments. Beside reproducibility, they also give control over resources and manage virtual devices. Things that are rather not needed during development.
- akshitgaur2005 8mo ago
  That is also an option with guix --container

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

esperent 8mo ago

> Dockerfiles are clunky and the rather extreme level of isolation is usually unnecessary and makes things overly complicated I agree, for local development docker is often overkill. However, for production it's absolutely not overkill. And since pretty much all projects are intended for production at some point, they'll need a Dockerfile and docker compose or some other equivalent. And at that point, you're maintaining the Dockerfile anyway, so why not use it for local dev as well? That way your dev and production environments can be close to identical. Guix looks nice - probably nicer than docker for dev work. But is it nice enough to justify maintaining two separate systems and have your dev and production diverge?

dominicm 8mo ago
While not directly mentioned in this article, guix pack[1] allows you to distribute your software in multiple formats, including Docker images. The general philosophy of Guix is to have a single definition for how to build your software and use it for the entire dev to production pipeline. [1]: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...
skavi 8mo ago
In Nix (and, I’d assume, for Guix) you can go the other way around: https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles. As a side benefit, the generated docker image can be very tiny.
- valorzard 8mo ago
  Yeah Guix has a Dockerfile export
otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
You'd be nuts to run the Docker daemon anywhere near production.
- afarviral 8mo ago

goranmoomin 8mo ago

I feel like declarative container-like dev environments (e.g. nix shell or guix shell, and so on) will become much more popular in the following years with the rise of LLM agentic tools. It seems that the aformentioned tools provide much more value when they can get full access to the dev environment. Sprites[0], exe.dev[1], and more services seem to be focusing on providing instant VMs for these use cases, but for me it seems like it's a waste for users to have to ssh into a separate cloud server (and feel the latency) just to get a clean dev environment. I feel that a similar tool where you can get a clean slate dev environment from a declarative description locally, without all of the overhead and the weight of Docker or VMs would be very welcomed. (Note: I am not trying to inject AI-hype on a Guix-related post, I do realize that the audience of LLM tools and Guix would be quite different, this is just an observation) [0]: https://sprites.dev https://sprites.dev [1]: https://exe.dev https://exe.dev

attila-lendvai 8mo ago
random note: there's `guix shell --container --emulate-fhs`.
sdsd 8mo ago
As a Guix lover and LLM tooling enthusiast, I complete agree. Administrating my system via Claude Code is so much easier. LLMs work better on a system that's hackable via text.

sohrob 8mo ago

I wanted to go all-in on Guix but the installation process was made too difficult due to the lack of non-free software available during install time. I wish they would take the Debian approach and leave it up to the user to decide which packages they would like installed on their system or not.

icen 8mo ago
There’s nonguix for access to non free drivers and such. I think that system crafters have some installable images if you don’t have a current guix install to build one It’s regrettable that this is necessary, but with so few Ethernet ports on laptops it’s harder to install these things without access to WiFi.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

rudhdb773b 8mo ago

I love Guix documentation, but unfortunately I've had to stick with Nix because its more polished with a large library of packages. LLMs have also made writing syntacticly correct Nix scripts much easier, so I don't miss Guix's Guile that much.

tetris11 8mo ago

I love Guile over Nix syntax, but the one killer feature Nix has that Guix doesn’t is making a single static binary of common programs and then deploying them elsewhere. In Nix, this is a single flag. In Guix, you either deploy with all libraries on a custom /guix path, or nothing.

dhon_ 8mo ago
How do you do it in nix?
- r14c 8mo ago
  Sounds like nix-bundle, but that's not a standard feature.
  - tetris11 8mo ago
    nix build nixpkgs#pkgsStatic.emacs So, it's not so much a static build from a flag, as it is a large corpus of statically defined recipes independent from the other packages that you can build from
kwk1 8mo ago
Is `guix pack` not sufficient for this? https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.html https://guix.gnu.org/manual/1.5.0/en/html_node/Invoking-guix...
- tetris11 8mo ago
  No, it produces a tree of libraries that you have to untar on the host machine. If you dont have root, then unpacking to /gnu/store is impossible
  - kwk1 8mo ago
    I checked and it looks like the root-required issue has been addressed with a --relocatable flag, and there are a few options as well for needing to untar, e.g. producing an appimage format output.

bflesch 8mo ago

How is the scheme syntax in any way an improvement over JSON? Can't they build the same thing but use JSON - which everyone already uses - instead of pushing a new verbose syntax?

cess11 8mo ago
I think it would be tricky to develop a package manager in JSON.

nickez 8mo ago

What if a piece of software isn't packaged, like for example the ARM GCC toolchain. In a Dockerfile I just need to curl and unpack it. How do I solve that with guix?

KnightHawk3 8mo ago
I use nix, but I assume the same goes for guix, you write a package or run it with something that emulates a FHS (like steam-run, don't mind the name) and hope it works. Writing a package is not as bad as it sounds, nix and guix have very little difference between "package maintainer" and "user" so most users probably can package software. Normally copying something from nixpkgs or similar will get you most the way there.

anthk 8mo ago

Guix asking for donations from propietary websites it's a disgrace to GNU. But i woudn't expect less from some hijackers. https://guix.gnu.org/donate/ https://guix.gnu.org/donate/ Proof: https://donate.stripe.com/8x2bJ133ia2H3Zw4j38N201 https://donate.stripe.com/8x2bJ133ia2H3Zw4j38N201 https://donate.stripe.com/aFaeVd7jy7Uz1Ro02N8N204 https://donate.stripe.com/aFaeVd7jy7Uz1Ro02N8N204 https://donate.stripe.com/dRm5kD47m0s79jQ9Dn8N202 https://donate.stripe.com/dRm5kD47m0s79jQ9Dn8N202

davexunit 8mo ago
Go away.
- anthk 8mo ago
  Go cry me a river. How can I donate to some platforms advertised by Guix with just running free software as you state? Go on. Explain us.

pshirshov 8mo ago

But flakes are more sound and more convenient!

r14c 8mo ago
I do wish guix had something like flakes

civodul 8mo ago

On the same topic, check out this how-to on software development with Guix from the Cookbook (author here): https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Software-Development.html https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Software-Developm... The idea was to show that there are several "levels" to take advantage of Guix for development, where the `guix.scm` file in David Thompson's blog post is the first level.