Comment by klardotsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klardotsh | Hacker News Reader

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I think much like how there's Nix and NixOS, it's important to draw a line between Guix (the package manager) and GuixSD (the Linux distribution).

Guix the package manager, while still not usable at work for me (lack of MacOS support - just 4 of my eng org's ~25 folks use Linux), is full of interesting ideas and features that work well in Linux settings, and can do useful things. It could make interesting dev shells, for example, much like nix-shell (or Flakes).

GuixSD without `nonguix`? Yeah, I unfortunately share your "it's dead in the water" opinion here. I'm not aware of much, if any, modern hardware that can fully boot to a usable-framerate GUI with networking (and that is also safe to use for such) without at least linux-firmware, which I believe is only available in nonguix. If there's exceptions to this, I'd genuinely love to hear them in a thread here.

The importance of proprietary software is quite overstated in my opinion. I've used stock Guix System on a large number of off-the-shelf servers and not once did I encounter missing drivers. I've used Guix System with linux-libre on old Sun hardware and the newest Dell servers --- never once did I have a problem due to the linux-libre kernel.

"dead in the water" looks different.

It sounds like the person you are replying to is talking about the desktop use case rather than servers.

Correct, I was, though I think it's fair to split GuixSD into server and desktop usecases and consider them separately. If it works for one and not the other, cool, maybe doing what Alpine did and billing Guix System for specifically server cases could work? (I still have outstanding questions in that realm in parent thread)

My understanding is that linux-libre strips CPU microcode as well, which is often used to patch hardware vulnerabilities - what's the recourse for such issues on servers like these, on GuixSD?

> not usable at work for me (lack of MacOS support - just 4 of my eng org's ~25 folks use Linux)

In case you're not aware, you can easily create a Guix pack[1] in the Docker image format that can be run on MacOS.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack....

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