Comment by roptat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roptat | Hacker News Reader

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The main guix "channel" (that's what it's called) contains more than 17.000 packages. Some software is hard to package, but I can't think of anything that's missing from the repository. You can have a look at the list of packages at https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/ (note that firefox for instance is called icecat and based on the ESR version).

There are no other official channels, but a bunch of people have their own channels with additional packages. The most popular is probably nonguix (https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix) which provides some popular nonfree packages.

Creating a recipe is generally easy (it's just a bunch of metadata) and even easier if it's supported by one of the importers (python, perl, emacs, ...). You can use guix on any other Linux system if you're not ready to install the complete system. The only difference is that your system is not managed by guix, and you can't run "guix system reconfigure", but the experience is otherwise the same. Make sure to follow the additional steps from the manual.

I use Guix as my daily driver and do occassionally come across software that hasn't been packaged. The big ones for my work that immediately come to mind are:

- slack

- kubectl

- terraform

- azure-cli

- cscope

There have been a several other missing tools for personal use that I just ended up packaging and sharing upstream. For the ones listed above, though, I just haven't gotten around to it, so I let Nix fill in the gap, hehe. FWIW, Guix already has Nix packaged and available as a service, so having parallel stores is really straightforward.

How in the world would I have discovered Firefox by that name? In retro, I find the trusted words kind of fun. But... How?

Icecat is a fork of Firefox to rid it of proprietary services and DRM. It's got a different name because Mozilla forbids (or used to forbid) redistribution with patches.

Debian also used to do this until Mozilla changed their tune on a few things. Debian's version and Icecat both used to be named IceWeasel, though, making fun of Mozilla.

Icecat is woefully out of date and contains a bunch of intrusive addons that break most sites, by default. YMMV.

Icecat tracks The latest ESR and is up to date.

Thanks; great to hear about the 17k packages and the "nonguix" channel!

Guix is pretty cool, and I'll probably switch to it one day.

But as of now, it lacks some basic stuff like KDE suit. The nonguix channel AFAIK doesn't have binary builds so you'll be building quite a few packages yourself. Using nonguix also means you can't expect support in official support channels. Just something to know before you start.

Using nonguix also means you can't expect support in official support channels. Just something to know before you start.

If this is true, it is a deal breaker for me. I try to buy open source hardware when I can, but even systems like the Pinebook Pro will have their functionality significantly limited by the absence of the linux-firmware package. It is a simple fact that most common WiFi chipset require non-free firmware.

That's not true. You get support for the part of the guix system that is free software from guix, and support for what comes from nonguix, from nonguix. So if you have issues with the proprietary driver, you talk about it on #nonguix, but if you have troubles with guix, you talk about it on official channels like #guix.

Thanks for the clarification. That sounds like a much more reasonable policy.

  nonguix channel AFAIK doesn't have binary builds so you'll be building quite a few packages yourself

To be more accurate guix will be building the package for you. The only difference for the user is the time it takes to install the package.

There is a nonguix substitution server - https://mirror.brielmaier.net

Thank you for this! Missing KDE is a dealbreaker for primary system, but I can start using nonguix for older systems now.

Edit: I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but the job says 0 builds (eg. https://mirror.brielmaier.net/eval/97958?status=succeeded&pa...). I'm not familiar with how guix works, but where can I see list of actual built derivations for a particular job?

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