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Comment by arximboldi | Hacker News Reader

Any experiences with using GuixSD as a main distribution for a standard laptop working environment? I have been using Debian Sid for more than a decade but the idea of having a system fully configured via reproducible pure Scheme functions is tempting for sure...

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I just installed GuixSD 0.12 last week on a Dell 13 7000. Went mostly smoothly (had to use Grub BIOS instead of UEFI, that's been fixed in 0.13) after I replaced the Intel WiFi card with an Atheros based one.

My needs are simple: emacs, Clojure (with Icedtea), Icecat and StumpWM. Plus all the guile goodness!

Just realized I'm living in a system with four Lisps front and center (guile, Common Lisp, elisp, and Clojure)

That sounds pretty awesome. :)

I'm just here with two NixOS machines playing with ML languages.

Have you tried NixOS & do you have an opinion regarding it? Or was it just straight to GuixSD?

I have been using GuixSD on my Thinkpad X220 for about 2 years now and it is has been good overall. I have fairly simple needs: GNOME 3, Emacs, Firefox (called IceCat in GuixSD). The full system rollback feature has been very handy at times when I do something terrible to my OS configuration file and just want to move on to other things.

I I may (I hope I'm not coming across as rude, I'm genuinely interested in running GuixSD):

How 'recent' are the packages?

I care for little things, but say.. libvirt or Firefox would be something I'd like to keep quite up to date. Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?

Do you use any 'unfree' packages and how much hassle is it to acquire those?

Packages are kept very up-to-date in general. The contributors try their best to keep up with the latest stable releases, so freshness resembles a distro like Arch more than Debian. I don't use any nonfree packages and Guix provides none because it conforms to the GNU FSDG, so there is no Firefox package available. Someone could provide a nonfree package collection that users could install separately but I don't know of any. The IceCat project is based on the extended support releases of Firefox and Guix provides updates quickly. I hope that someday Firefox will become FSDG compliant so there's no longer a need for IceCat.

> Someone could provide a nonfree package collection that users could install separately but I don't know of any.

This is the main think holding me back from switching to GuixSD (from NixOS). While I do like the prospect of running a 100% free OS, I'm not 100% sure I can with my current hardware. If I install GuixSD, and find out that I need a non-free driver or kernel, the responsibility of getting that falls on my completely inexperienced lap. I would be much more inclined to run a partially non-free system to get used to GuixSD, then start cutting out the non-free parts.

> How 'recent' are the packages?

It's the only place I know of where you can currently get GCC 7.1. [0]

> Is it possible to run Firefox (not Iceweasel)?

If you spun up your own package, and didn't distribute, probably. The IceCat package is 746 lines of Scheme at the moment, so porting it might not be complete hell. [1]

That being said, the current IceCat is based on Firefox 52, so that's a fairly close version-parity, even if you miss out on the nonfree aspects of FF.

> libvirt

Guix currently has libvirt 3.2.0, whereas the very latest is 3.3.0. A fairly close parity, and I'd expect an update to the Guix package soon-ish.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/g.html

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

Most of the "core" packages are very recent. Guix typically has zero-day updates for popular software such as git, kernel, ffmpeg etc, and obviously most of the GNU portfolio.

The only "unfree" package I use is the vanilla Linux kernel (for non-free wifi firmware), which is fairly easy to tie into the system configuration.

I tried to use it on top of my Ubuntu install to manage dependencies, and the very first thing I wanted to do didn't work. I wanted to set up Java so I could run Clojure, and the version of Java they build can't make any https requests. There was also a subtext of "you should just build everything in Guix; don't use leiningen or maven". It was pretty disappointing. I hope they can get things to work better; it would be fantastic to have a declaration of all the things I want to install on my computer.

> the version of Java they build can't make any https requests

This is no longer true.

Our approach to Java is a bit ... unusual. Nobody in the Java world appears to be building everything from source, so bootstrapping the environment is a pretty tough job.

Now we bootstrap the JDK itself from Jikes and GNU Classpath, and we have quite a few more Java packages than before, but still not enough to get Maven packaged without resorting to using pre-built binaries.

There's still a long way to go, but we're walking it.

I'm very excited for this. I think that a fantastic use case for GUIX, which would solve a large pain point for companies, is initial computer setup. And, at least for me, that means Java. Having a single config file that installs and sets up a computer that's human-editable? Amazing.

I'm not using Maven, but Clojure, so perhaps that's enough. I'll see if I can try it out.

I have been using GuixSD on a variety of systems for a couple of years:

* my x86_64 laptop (X200S with libreboot) * two i686 laptops (a T60 and a netbook "server") * an x86_64 audio workstation for music recording * virtual servers at work

It's really convenient to have the system configuration declared in a Scheme file under version control. Rolling back to older variants in case of upgrade failures has also been very useful.

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