Why GNU Guix Matters | Hacker News Reader

Why GNU Guix Matters

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13 pointsduffsdevice7 comments

Just waiting for a stable package repo to use it as main. Like Debian or gentoo

Guix is a hacky clone that is mostly unusable due to the FSF's extremely stupid definition of free on the firmware level. Check out Nix instead, but I'm guessing that anyone reading this already knows about Nix

Check out Guix via Nix package definitions. Nix looks far more hacky (embedded shell scripts are standard). Guix package defs are declarative and readable (even for those with little Lisp exposure).

Guix is not tied to any kernel version. Hurd and Linux-libre are officially supported. But it is trivial for users to incorporate non-free firmwares.

Isn't embedded shell scripts exactly what you want though? I can't imagine having the flexibility of configuring entire unix systems without beeing able to ever touch a shell script. Unless you are writing shell scripts in some kind of meta language, but that's just writing shell scripts in another form.

In fact I just spend 5 minutes to search for the source of a few Guix packages and I couldn't find it. I found this: https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/ which is a meager list without any link to the packaging source. Huge red flag for a distro.

> I found this: https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/ which is a meager list without any link to the packaging source.

I clicked the first

https://guix.gnu.org/en/packages/python-pyxel-1.4.3/

It says "Package source: game-development.scm" linking to https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages...

It's a lisp code that does what a shell script might do, but declaratively. Indeed it isn't much different from an Arch Linux PKGBUILD.

Isn't Nix and Guix definition the same? And you just have to include the non-free on both?

No, they are very different. Not unexpectedly, because Guix is not a fork of Nix.

They start to look similar at the level of compiled derivations, but even the builder scripts are different: in Guix they are compiled Guile scripts whereas in Nix they are Bash scripts.

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