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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a large piece of software. I'm interested in the purely functional, portable package manager aspect. I can see that it has [0] a lot of packages that are a pain to build on my Slackware system (or even to download prebuilt) because of the awesome number of dependencies. Downloading mpv and its dependencies takes quite a bit of time, for example. If anyone has experience with using guix this way, I'd be interested.

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

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At the beginning of this year I got hooked-up on this concept of functional system and package management. I've read through all the Nix documentation trying to get a feeling of how should I use it. And it just felt bad - sometimes the documentation was outdated, sometimes it clearly contradicts code on master, sometimes the programming style was inconsistent, sometimes the examples were unclear, too simple or too contrived... Thousand ways to achieve the same things and no clear "best practices" way.

Is guix's documentation any better? I mean - teach me the theory, but also show me practical examples making use of it so I could remember?

I'm clearly biased, but I think Guix's documentation is pretty clear, although it may be a little short on examples for some people.

I've never found the documentation to be outdated or grossly misleading.

I prefer guix documentation because it feel more like a guide than a reference.

I think this is exactly what I wanted to hear, will give Guix a shot I guess.

I also prefer guix's documentation. `info guix` is a very good resource. :)

> This seems like a large piece of software.

That's because Guix is an operating system :D

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix

Yes, but not only : "GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines."

GuixSD is the OS distribution; Guix is just the package manager. The two correspond to NixOS and Nix, respectively.

(Note: we call it "Guix System" instead of "GuixSD" now.)

There is little difference between Guix and the Guix system when looking a little more closely. Even when using Guix as a package manager it won't link with any of your OS libraries, so you end up downloading or building variants of libraries that you may already have on your host operating system --- that's by design as it unlocks reproducible builds.

Why not call it the obvious thing: GuixOS?

The scheme you have now is confusing for no reason. I saw this news on Phoronix and even after reading the article I couldn't tell if it was the pkg manager or the distro that had reached 1.0 (I guess it's both?).

They are both the same. With the "guix system" family of commands you can build containers, VMs, and you can also install a system on bare hardware. Describing it as a package manager really doesn't do the thing justice. You can use all of the "guix system" family of commands even on top of a foreign distribution --- except for "guix system init" which installs the Guix system on your hardware and "guix system reconfigure" which upgrades it on your hardware.

Good to know about the terminology change. Thanks!

I understand what you mean by the difference. (I currently overlay Nix on top of a different Linux distribution.) But without the "system" part, Guix on its own is still not strictly an OS, since there's no kernel being deployed. A pedantic point, but an accurate one I think. :)

True, but with "guix system vm" you also get a kernel --- just inside of qemu instead of bare-metal ;)

Fair point. I stand corrected! :)

Is GuixSD more stable after this new release? I really wanted to try using it on one of my machines but I ran into issues.

I couldn't say. I run Nix, not Guix.

Personally the thing that holds me back from Guix is their (understandable) insistence on packaging libre/free software only. Guix looks like it has better usability than Nix, IMO, but I don't want to jump through extra hoops to get non-free software installed.

Does there not exist a community non-free repo at this point?

I don't know. If there's a decent, supported community repo -- similar in extent and quality to Nixpkgs -- then I'd consider giving Guix a proper try.

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